Yoshimitsu Benedict Endō Guilt Shame And The Post War Idea Of Japan
A Peculiar Pentimento
1. A Peculiar Pentimento
Videogames and Japan-America Transcultural Flows
Gary Walsh
Introduction
In the late 1970s and early 1980s, the United States witnessed a wave of Japanese exports which, unlike
previous products associated with Japan, were of high-quality, made with cutting-edge technologies, and from
high-tech industries. Automated automobile manufacturing that produced small, fuel efficient cars along with
consumer electronics like the Walkman and VHS heralded Japan’s technological prowess and ability to compete
successfully in industries once dominated by the United States. Riding on this wave of products from Japan
were videogames. With the failure of the domestic videogame market in the early 1980s, this created an
opportunity for Japanese firms to sell their sophisticated home entertainment videogame consoles in the U.S—
of which Nintendo and Sega dominated.
Unlike the myriad of automobiles and electronics which were by and large bereft of cultural markers
(save perhaps for the brand names), videogames came with overt signs of otherness. The box art, booklets, and
the games themselves often utilized an aesthetic that was typical of manga and anime styles in Japan but
believed foreign to American audiences. Other high-tech products from Japan were deliberately ‘deodorized’ of
Japanese national origins.1
However, videogames were harder to deodorize as a whole given the highly visual
nature of these products. While the text of the games was understandably translated into English, re-rendering
the packaging and renaming games was a deliberate attempt to make the products more marketable to
American audiences. In essence, the original Japanese art was painted over by American distributors seeking to
sell Japanese products in the United States. That is, a pentimento occurred. Yet, what was being expurgated
was an aesthetic and series of tropes already heavily influenced by America in that Japan had been “a voracious
and seemingly insatiable consumer of American cultural forms as well as an attentive observer of American
trends and techniques of marketing and advertising” since the end of World War II.2
In other words, like the
Japanese animation already familiar to American audiences up to the 1980s (e.g. Speed Racer, Astro Boy,
Voltron), videogame imports were already highly subjected to American influence and mukokuseki
(denationalization)3
in that the ethnic or cultural markers of the visual imagery was already erased or altered in
response to transcultural flows defined by “a Western-dominated cultural hierarchy”. 4
But what makes the
process of stripping videogames of otherness in the 1980s significant is the contradictory nature of the process
itself given that it coincided with a period in American history in which there existed a heightened sense of
awareness, if not outright animosity, of Japanese economic competition and yet a desire for Japanese products.
The physical presence of such brands as Nintendo served as a reminder of the penetration of Japanese products
and America’s lack of competiveness in high-tech industries but also provided new forms of entertainment and
exposure to Japanese cultural forms —no matter how fabricated and altered that Japan was.
The 1990s witnessed Japan going from the Japan that can do no wrong as in Ezra Vogel’s Japan as
Number One to the Japan disease as the very practices once thought at the core of Japan’s strong economy and
social cohesiveness which made the country the “poster child of modernization theory” became highly
1
Koichi Iwabuchi, “How ‘Japanese’ is Pokemon?” in Pikachus’ Global Adventure: The Rise and Fall of Pokemon, ed. Joseph
Tobin (Duke University Press, 2004), 57.
2
Marilyn Ivy, “Formations of Mass Culture,” in Postwar Japan as History, ed. Andrew Gordom (Berkley: University of
California Press, 1993), 257.
3
Literally stateless
4
Iwabuchi, “How ‘Japanese’ is Pokemon?, 59.
2. scrutinized and believed to be responsible for Japan’s economic and social breakdown as the 90s progressed.5
This decline in economic strength and internal social turmoil did not correspond with a retreat of Japan’s
presence from American markets, especially in regards to the consumption of products associated with
Japanese popular culture. The 1990s can be seen as a paradoxical decade in this regard as Japan’s cultural
presence in the United States became more significant and apparent in the 1990s than in the previous decade
when Japan was at the apex of its economic power in juxtaposition to the U.S. The reason for this was that the
1990s was a time of reinvesting in and remarketing Japan’s already well-established mass culture industries
which produced what has been referred to as Japan’s GNC (Gross National Cool).6
Although the origins of
Japan’s GNC can be traced back before the post-bubble period, Japanese businesses began to significantly
capitalize on the exportation of Japanese popular culture as a means of economic viability during a recessionary
decade.
While Japan was undergoing a difficult transitional phase, the 1990s was also a period of transition for
videogames in which the painting over of videogame graphic design that defined the 1980s gave way to more
blatant and deliberate signs of Japaneseness. As more Japanese videogames, manga, anime, and toys became
available to American consumers, in addition to increasing demand for these products, otherness, which had
previously been suppressed, became a primary marketing strategy for selling Japanese popular culture
productions in the United States by the end of the 1990s. On the surface it would appear that Japan was being
allowed more room for creative expression and representation, but the videogames of this era exposed the
more complex processes defining transcultural flows occurring between the U.S and Japan up to that time. The
1990s therefore uncovered the underlying strata of cultural consumption informing certain aspects of
videogame production in what bell hooks has termed “eating the other”. In this case, videogames coming from
Japan have often carried with them cultural expressions that were deliberately rendered to cater to a dominant
culture, i.e. the U.S. This pattern should not be seen as a one way process in which the United States dictates
Japanese recognition and representation in cultural commodification. Rather, products like videogames are
ultimately a reification of how “Japanese and American cultural spaces are no longer entirely distinct or
autonomous”.7
Japan has long been cognizant of ‘Western’ ideologies and cultural forms while at the same
time appropriating domestic culture for the purposes of commodification to sell the resulting products both at
home and abroad.
The concealed layers that were exposed during the 1990s characterizing the production of Japanese
videogames were mukokuseki, followed by self-orientalization and neo-nostalgia. The first of these,
mukokuseki, has been most apparent in the near universal presence of white (or rather non-Japanese)
characters in videogames. Mukokuseki can thus be understood as a racializing process whereby the belief of
erasing or downplaying Japanese characteristics in favor of a neutral whiteness (which is itself loosely defined)
can create a global appeal for characters. This practice within videogames simply reproduces racial discourses
where whiteness becomes the standard by which all other ethnicities or racial classifications are measured.
During the 1980s, already denationalized characters were sometimes re-rendered by American distributors and
in so doing obfuscated transmitted racial ideologies already operating behind the original representations.
Seemingly contradictory to denationalizing processes (and self-orientalization is indeed a contradictory
practice), self-orientalizition, in contrast to Edward Said’s orientalism, “exploits the Orientalist gaze to turn itself
into an Other.”8
Self-orientalization reinforces the problematic dichotomy of Western/Eastern as homogeneous
5
Tomika Yoda, “A Roadmap to Millennial Japan,” in Japan after Japan, ed. Tomiko Yoda and Harry Harootunian (Durham:
Duke University Press, 2006), 17.
6
Douglas McGray, “Japan’s Gross National Cool,” in Foreign Policy, May/June 2002. 47, 48
7
Hirofuni Katsuno and Jeffrey Maret, “Localizing Pokemon” in Pikachus’ Global Adventure: The Rise and Fall of Pokemon,
ed. Joseph Tobin (Duke University Press, 2004), 93, 103.
8
Amy Shirong Lu, “The Many Faces of Internationalization in Japanese Anime” in Animation: An Interdisciplinary Journal
vol.3 (London: Sage Publishing, 2008) 182.
3. entities as it relies on this paradigm to exert itself as an intelligible sign system. Self-orientalization is thus an
active practice as the ‘West’ is deliberately situated as the privileged term opposite Eastern/Oriental from which
both terms can operate. Japan purposely others itself based on this relationship and, therefore, self-
orientalizing is always a process of self-exotifying. Hardly static, this practice allows Japan a high degree of
ambivalence. Representations of Japan vacillate between the Western (read as universal) and Eastern (read as
exotic) in cultural commodification. When videogames are subjected to mukokuseki, for example, Japan
positions itself as an exotic Other that must be visually altered or suppressed. Contrary to this, certain
representations of Japan are also hyper-realized to emphasize Japan’s oriental, and thus exotic, nature. In the
deliberate act of playing off otherness either in its suppression or exaltation to sell to foreign and, interestingly
enough, domestic audiences, Japan becomes a simulacrum in which representations come to serve as stand-ins
for the real to the point where the representation no longer references any reality whatsoever only that which
has been fabricated for the purposes of producing a desirable commodity.
Self-Orientalization would not be possible without a referential framework from which to operate. That
is, self-orientalism is as much of an introspection of national identity as much as an awareness of the foreign
gaze. Given this, self-orientalism is a nostalgic enterprise as ideas of the nation are always conceptualized in
terms of tradition, cultural history, and shared experience. Self-orientalization is predicated on the nostalgic
imagery of the nation but is also the result of the manufacture of products and images that at once represent
Japan while also narrating Japan. As Jean Baudrillard suggests, “When the real is no longer what it was,
nostalgia assumes its full meaning”.9
Although many videogames from Japan have relied on self-orientalization
and the nostalgia that underlies it, since the 1990s, however, videogames from Japan have experienced a shift
from nostalgia to what anthropologist Marilyn Ivy calls neo-nostalgia.
Neo-nostalgia differs from nostalgia in that the former is thoroughly postmodern whereby the
“dominance of images and the impossibility of thinking about a social reality without considering the powers of
the media” along with the parody and pastiche of the nostalgic dominate.10
In neo-nostalgia there is no sense of
loss, return, or adherence to historicity as nostalgia suggests. In regards to Japan this can be traced back to two
significant events. During the 1970s the ad campaign Discover Japan emerged to stimulate domestic tourism
prompting that the Japanese could access a more essential Japanese self through nature and the rural. The rural
was seen as the repository of tradition and history and thus critical to the formation of the national body, but
has also been demarcated as backward and lacking progress.11
What was perceived lost in Japan’s transition to
modernity and contemporary urban life could be rediscovered in Japan’s peripheries. During the 1980s, Exotic
Japan displaced the Discover Japan campaign. Rather than representing Japan as a familiar place that had
simply been forgotten or misplaced, Exotic Japan posited Japan as a foreign place and “encouraged Japanese to
look at Japan with the eyes of a foreign other”.12
Exotic Japan inverted the Discover Japan ethos: “self-identity
turns into a claim for radical alterity”.13
Exotic Japan also exploited ideas of Americanization whereby Japanese
youth born during Japan’s high growth period were believed to have ”grown up in an Americanized, affluent
state in which certain things Japanese appear more exotic than products of western civilization”.14
Since
Japanese videogames began first being exported to the U.S during the 1980s they have served the double
function of presenting Japan as a fascinating Other for foreign audiences while also creating curious virtual
worlds of self-discovery (self-deception?) for the Japanese themselves. Although speaking on anime, Hirofumi
Katsuno and Jeffrey Maret’s argument can be applied to videogames in that so called “traditional characters are
9
Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, trans. Sheila Faria Glaser (Ann Arbor: University of MicheganPress, 1994), 6.
10
Marilyn Ivy, “Formations of Mass Culture,” 256.
11
Marilyn Ivy, Discourses of the Vanishing: Modernity, Phantasm, Japan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 34, 42,
43.
12
Marilyn Ivy, “Formations of Mass Culture,” 256.
13
Marilyn Ivy, Discourses of the Vanishing, 51
14
Marilyn Ivy, Discourses of the Vanishing, 55
4. marked as belonging to a traditional Japan that is almost as exotic to contemporary Japanese viewers as it is to
an American audience”.15
Japanese videogames, as neo-nostalgia, reveal how history is coalesced by culture
industries irrespective of context and brought into the present— in this case further framing Japan within the
space of the hyperreal as these videogames are mass produced and distributed to both domestic and foreign
markets based on their exotic appeal and not necessarily on authenticity or sentimentality.
In each instance, these terms are useful in analyzing the external influences motivating Japan’s
deliberate manufacturing of endemic representations—which are in no small part exacerbated by a need to
construct otherness for those commodities driving Japan’s GNC. Although this essay will only focus on the visual
analysis of a few select examples from the past 25 years or so, examining the graphic design of videogames
using these terms as a theoretical lens supplies a means of understanding broader historical trends in the
globalization, glocalization, and postmodernization of Japan vis-à-vis the United States. Indeed, while manga
and anime imported to the United States have received a great deal of attention from scholars in various fields,
videogames have remained largely peripheral despite the fact that “Japan’s most successful cultural exports to
date have been computer games”.16
Negotiating Space
The opening of Japan by Commodore Perry in 1854 inaugurated the steady importation of Japanese
culture to the United States. Japan quickly established itself in the American imagination, especially in regards
to Japan’s visual culture. Over the course of the late 19th
and 20th
century various Japanese fads had come and
gone in American society inspiring literature, art, design, fashion, and martial disciplines. While World War II
punctuated the flow of goods between the U.S and Japan, this did not extinguish interest in the country or a
desire for Japanese artifacts. The postwar period witnessed Japan becoming situated in American popular
culture in the form of Akira Kurosawa films, Godzilla, and Speed Racer. By the 1980s, Japan had already become
well-represented in American media industries both in terms of financial investments but also media
productions. Indicative of the decade were Sho Kosugi films and anime programs such as Voltron, with Japanese
influence present in the artwork of Patrick Nagel, the cyberpunk imagery of Blade Runner, and the cartoon
series Transformers which was rendered by Japanese animators in an anime style. Many Japanese words had
also become part of the American vernacular such as sushi, karate, ninja, origami and samurai—with manga and
anime being later additions. However, the transfer of film and videogames, that is Japanese popular media
products originally produced in Japan, became a problematic enterprise in the 1980s despite Japan’s long
established cultural presence.
The heavy editing of Hayao Miyazaki’s animated film Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (1984) for
American audiences stands out as an example of an increasing unease at the presence of an assertive Japan
which had emerged as a powerful economic giant capable of competing with the United States in the 1980s. As
Susan J. Napier argues, “the Japanese economic juggernaut of the 1980s not only threatened American financial
and political power, but also American identity, specifically, its masculine identity”. 17
During the 1980s a once
marginal Japan now encroached into American cultural space in way that it had not done so nor was capable of
before. But popular films of American origin that appropriated Japanese/Eastern themes and imagery such as,
Enter the Ninja (1981), American Ninja (1985) or Blood Sport (1988) were not scrutinized in the same way as
direct cultural exports from Japan. These films were heavily reliant on an orientalist discourse that still placed
Japan firmly as a romanticized Other while keeping a highly visible American/Western white masculinity at the
15
Katsuno and Maret, 88.
16
Joseph Tobin, “Rise and Fall of the Pokemon Empire” in Pikachus’ Global Adventure: The Rise and Fall of Pokemon, ed.
Joseph Tobin (Duke University Press, 2004), 261.
17
Susan J. Napier, From Impressionism to Anime: Japan as Fantasy and Fan Cult in the Mind of the West (New York:
Palgrave MacMillan, 2007), 91.
5. center of the narrative. After WWII Japan became positioned as the subservient, passive, feminine Eastern
partner to the assertive, dynamic, masculine West of the United States partly by way of Article 9 circumscribing
Japan’s war making capabilities in addition to America’s continued physical presence in Japan since the end of
the war.18
Japan’s penetration of American automobile, electronics, and entertainment industries upset this
balance. Seen in racial and gender terms, Japan came to serve metonymically as a “lean and mean organic
capitalist machine threatening to overtake ‘white capitalism’” (Yoda 32)19
. Read one way, Nausicaä, as a
futuristic heroine of Japanese origin, was a derisive symbol directed at a superseded United States.
Fig. 1: (Left) Warriors of the Wind (1985) VHS sleeve.
Fig. 2: (Right) Japanese Movie Poster for Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (1984). The side text reads: Fly,
Nausicaä! Love and courage in your breast…(Tobe, Naushika! Ai to yūki wo mune ni…).
Although not a videogame, the design of the original American VHS release of Nausicaä of the Valley of
the Wind (renamed Warriors of the Wind in the U.S) is indicative of the painting over that occurred in
videogames as they were imported to the U.S during the 1980s. What makes this process peculiar is that the
Japanese aesthetic in the artwork of Nausicaä (Figures 1 and 2) and videogames was the end result of prior
acculturation and contact with the ‘West’ in that foreign concepts of race and gender, narrative styles, and
artistic techniques were incorporated with native visual culture— the artwork of the Taishō era (1912-1926)
immediately comes to mind.20
The origins of manga and anime underlying the artwork of videogames are
convoluted as both are derived from several historical conjunctions which are beyond the scope of this paper. In
brief, the static images of manga in terms of manga as a visual medium and as an illustration style can be traced
back to ukiyo-e and shunga popular during the Edo period (1603-1868) but also late 19th
and early 20th
century
Japanese political and public commentary cartoons which had European origins. The manga art style continued
18
Yoshikuni Igarashi, Bodies of Memory: Narratives of Postwar Japanese Culture, 1945-1970 (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2000), 43.
19
Yoda, 32.
20
While Brian Ruh in ““Transforming U.S Anime in the 1980s: Localization and Longevity” gives a detailed explanation as to
the failure of Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind during the movies initial release in the United States compared to other
sci-fi anime popular at the time such as Voltron and Robotech and the auteurism occurring in the films foreign production,
my goal is to supply a visual analysis of the films divisive artwork. He discusses the editing of the film, not the box art.
6. to develop in the 20th
century with further inspiration coming from American popular culture such as comic
strips and comic books and compositional changes introduced by manga artist Osamu Tezuka (1928-1989)
creator of Astro Boy.21
While anime is more recent, as Gilles Poitras argues in “Contemporary Anime in Japanese
Pop Culture”, “Anime has no special origin: it comes from the same nineteenth-century roots that all animation
comes from. In the Meiji era…there was a rich flow of technical and artistic knowledge between the Japanese,
European, and American cultures. Artistic theories, media, and techniques flowed among all three cultures,
forever changing the arts worldwide”.22
By the late 20th century cultural flows between the ‘East’ and ‘West’
were highly intertwined if not interdependent. Even in the 1980s the processes of globalization resulted in a
scenario in which “with the global flow of texts, images, commodities, and information, intertextual associations
are no longer confined within a particular sociolinguistic or cultural system”.23
To paint over the artwork of
Japanese videogames by American distributors was a disavowal of the inherent Westernization of the artwork
and the increasing realities of globalization.
An 8-Bit Dialectic
Not all videogames during the 1980s from Japan experienced a radical transformation in terms of the
box art and other graphic elements. In some instances the videogame art remained intact or the artwork in the
booklets that came with the videogames contained the original Japanese artwork—often in the form of manga
style characters. While there are many excellent examples of the era, the videogames in this section have been
selected because they show a clear indication of transcultural flows between the United States and Japan and
the glocalizing and mukokuseki processes characteristic of those flows. As such, the American art and the
Japanese art cannot be seen as operating independently. Rather, these examples illustrate how both the
American art and the Japanese art sometimes informed one another creating a synthesis—a dialectic if you will.
Fig. 3: (Left) Front cover of Rockman 2 (1988) for the Famicom system.
Fig. 4: (Right) Front Cover for Megaman 2 (1989) for the Nintendo Entertainment System.
21
Kinko Ito, “Manga in Japanese History” in Japanese Visual Culture: Explorations in the World of Manga and Anime ed.
Mark W. MacWilliams, (New York: M.E Sharpe Inc, 2008).
22
The word anime in Japanese does not refer solely to Japanese animation, only animation in general.
Gilles Poitras, “Contemporary Anime in Japanese Pop Culture” in Japanese Visual Culture: Explorations in the World of
Manga and Anime ed. Mark W. MacWilliams, (New York: M.E Sharpe Inc, 2008), 49.
23
Katsuno and Maret, 99.
7. Mega Man (known as Rockman in Japan) is a classic example of a mukokuseki character, but the
Japanese box art for Rockman 2 (Fig. 3) utilizes a composition style similar to superflat. Superflat, popularized
by postmodern artist Takashi Murakami, borrows from the flattened forms of Japanese graphic art and
commonly appears as an artistic device in the Japanese animation and other popular culture images. Superflat,
as the name suggests, ignores depth and scale in favor of bringing all the images within a composition to the
foreground.24
While this style draws from Japanese wood block prints and thus a traditional visual culture of
Japan, such nuances would not necessarily be important or known by American consumers. Similar in style to
the Rockman artwork, the original Japanese box art for Super Mario Brothers (not pictured) also employed the
exact same compositional style. Joseph Tobin and Koichi Iwabuchi have both pointed out that Super Mario
Brothers was easier to export due to the mukokuseki nature of Mario and lack of Japanese references in the
videogame, but this does not explain why the box art was changed. If Mario and Megaman were already read as
white or nationless by producers and American distributors, this brings into question why the need to paint over
these characters? The need to attract consumers is certainly a plausible explanation but what was painted over
was more American than perhaps the distributors realized.
Megaman was not purely the product of any one style, but Megaman’s roots would seem far more
American than Japanese. Indeed, the Japanese name of Rockman is derived from Rock music and his robot
sister is named Roll.25
In figure 3 the villains that appear around Rockman as well as himself are all colored with
a Caucasian flesh tone—one cannot help but reminisce about the peach colored crayon. Rockman’s neotenous
features such as his cherub like body and large eyes share a similarity with Walt Disney characters. This is not
unjustifiable as “Disney comics and animation were widely distributed and screened in Japan during and after its
postwar occupation by the United States and consequently influenced many elements of the manga style such
as the large eyes and cute features…”.26
By contrast, the American box art (Fig. 4) depicts Megaman in a more
anthromorpic fashion with Megaman and three other characters from the game (left to right: Dr.Wily,
Crashman, and Quickman) designed in a comic book fashion. Also, the American box art dispenses of the
superflat quality of the Japanese version focusing on the illusion of depth. Unlike the Japanese version in which
there is no clear sense of scale and the foreground and background mingle, the approach of the American box
art has the feel of Renaissance paintings in which figures cast shadows and overlap to show scale and depth, and
a slight atmospheric distortion appears as the background recedes. By comparison, the Japanese version of
Rockman seems more puerile but not necessarily too foreign for American audiences. The American version
departs too far from the actual game as well in that the characters on the Japanese version of the box appear
exactly as they do in the game in 8-bit form. Thus, the American artwork with human like characters and three-
dimensional depth would seem a bit misleading.
Starting in the 1990s, later sequels to the game beginning with Megaman 3 (1990) and the Gameboy
versions of Megaman presented a Megaman closer to the original Japanese renditions but without the superflat
quality and overall manga style of the characters. Later American versions of Megaman would therefore
indicate a synthesis combining the box art of Megaman 1 and 2 with the illustrations for the Japanese Rockman
games. This transition, however, simply created a new pentimento. But the original art that had been painted
over began to reveal itself steadily throughout the 1990s ending with the American box art for Megaman X4
(1997) featuring the original Japanese manga art for the characters Megaman X and Zero on the cover. But in
a postmodern twist, the box art for Megaman 9 (2008) and Megaman 10 (2010) parodied the very art that
24
Thomas Looser, “Superflat and the Layers of Image and History in 1990s Japan” in Mechademia vol.1, ed. Frenchy
Lunning (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006).
25
Richard Mitchell, “Who Changed Rockman’s Name to Mega Man?” Joystiq.com (2008)
http://www.joystiq.com/2009/08/01/who-changed-rockmans-name-to-mega-man/
26
Jason Bainbridge and Craig Norris, “Hybrid Manga: Implications for the Global Knowledge Economy” in Manga: An
Anthology of Global and Cultural Perspectives,ed Toni Johnson-Woods (New York: The Continuum International Publishing
Group, 2010), 243.
8. masked the original Japanese versions of the 1980s as an intentional gesture in recognition of the glocalization
that had occurred in videogame art during that decade.27
Megaman represents a steady, overt interplay between artistic influences, but the artwork from Contra,
Double Dragon II, and Ninja Gaiden I and II are far more sophisticated in regards to glocalization and cultural
representation. In these games orientalization and self-orientalization operate alongside Americanization and
even self-Americanization creating a tangled web of othering as each country seeks to represent the Other in
often stereotyped ways while also considering how they are also viewed and represented in a transnational
context. In the box art for Contra and Double Dragon II white masculinity is a dominate theme for both the
Japanese and American versions of the game. In each case, national identities are projected through
representations of the masculine in differing but also highly contested ways. In addition, Japanese history,
martial arts action films, and Japanese-American relations are muddled in Ninja Gaiden by the processes of
orientalization, self-orientalization, and even neo-nostalgia.
Fig. 5: (Left) Front Cover of Contra (USA) for Nintendo Entertainment System.
Fig. 6 (Right) Front Cover of Contra (Japan).
In both the Japanese and American box art for the videogame Contra (1988) white masculinity is
embodied by two gun-toting soldiers suggestive of American action movies of the time such as Predator (1987)
and First Blood (1982). The game itself is a blend of U.S foreign policy in Central America and alien invasion
science fiction. Given this, the protagonists are appropriately chosen though still a deliberate act of mukokuseki
in the use of America as a universal symbol of both popular culture and global hegemony. Whether this type of
representation was a homage or insult is unclear but the American version of Contra (Fig. 5) parodies the game’s
underlying themes by deliberately rendering the cover of the box art as a pastiche of First Blood, Predator and
Alien (1979). As if the action hero references were not clear enough, the American box art unabashedly
transposes stills of Arnold Schwarzenegger on the cover (Fig.7). The glocalization of the game can be referred
to as a type of self-Americanization in that the artwork serves as a highly expressive medium by which American
identity in the post-Vietnam era can be asserted. In the game art “the perceived decline of American power
both in relation to other nations, as well as a recent, fondly remembered past” is inscribed on male bodies.28
In
essence, the American videogame art, like certain action movies of the 1980s, served as a form of recuperation
from a sense of loss and betrayal experienced during the Vietnam conflict. In an interesting interplay, Japanese
artists responded in kind by parodying the American version of Contra in Contra Spirits (1992). In the Japanese
box art of Contra Spirits (Fig.7), the image of Arnold Schwarzenegger from the cover of the movie Raw Deal
27
To see these parodies visit http://iam8bit.com/?s=+mega+man
28
William Warner, “Spectacular Action: Rambo and the Popular Pleasures of Pain” in Cultural Studies ed. Lawrence
Grossbern et al. (New York: Routledge, Chapman and Hall, Inc., 1992), 673.
9. (1986) is transferred with only the slightest alteration. In the American version of Contra Spirits, (Contra 3 in the
U.S) no such image appears. Contra characterized America’s cultural and political presence in the 1980s but
more significantly Japanese awareness of American popular culture and a willingness to appropriate and
redirect the very symbolisms of white masculinity in an era when Japan threatened the racialized balance of
West and the rest.29
Fig. 7: The American box art for Contra transposed images of Arnold Schwarzenegger from the movie Predator.
The Japanese responded in kind by using the same technique in later sequels such as Contra Spirits (right).
In the game Double Dragon 2 (1989) the Western gaze of the East is turned in on itself. At the same
time, the East reflects on the West in a nihonjinron (essentialist discourses on the Japanese) fashion by
presenting the West as disorderly and decaying society as opposed to the homogenous and ordered society of
Japan.30
Surprisingly, the box art for both the Japanese and American version of the Nintendo game (Fig. 8 and
9) utilize the same image but the Commodore 64 version (Fig. 10) does not. In all three compositions, a
muscular white male figure stands atop a conceptual pyramid where he struggles to maintain on top lest he be
pulled down into the chaos below. There is no indication where the scene is taking place, but this is not
necessary. The setting is any-city U.S.A. An American interpretation of this image at the time suggests a
reference to the perceived ineptitude of political and social systems and thus the need to take law-and-order
into one’s own hands. This is symptomatic of the cultural climate of the 1970s and 1980s and was captured in
such movies as Deathwish (1974), Above the Law (1988) and television series such as The A-Team (1983-1987).
Viewed from a nihonjinron perspective, the artwork serves as an awareness of America’s domestic attitudes but
also a critique of American society as a whole. The very image of the white male hero fighting against the
System and outside of the law is the very object of critique. The untenable position of the protagonists and the
terrified blonde female on the box art serve as symbols for an America being consumed by itself and in
desperate need of help. In this weakened state, the presence of the White female takes the place of the Asian
Female as seen in the eyes of the Western male and positions the blonde female as an exotic object of sexual
desire. Her tattered skirt and flailing hair indicate her “wild female sexuality, a sign of otherness, is there to be
tamed and normalized”.31
America is out of control. Such an inversion signals the position of America to Japan
in the 1980s as white masculine potency was challenged by a resurgent, masculine, and confident Japan.
But this critique as conducted through this particular visual medium is both a response to the Western
gaze towards the East while also presenting the game in a self-orientalized fashion. Like a Jean-Claude Van
Damme or Steven Seagal movie, in Double Dragon the white male learns from the East. In disciplining the white
male body by way of adopting Eastern martial and spiritual practices, this body then becomes an agent that can
restore order and balance to an undisciplined society. The Japanese box art for Double Dragon II both reinforces
this trope while also reflecting it back onto its Hollywood origins. The East is reduced to a mystique: a closed
29
Naoki Sakai, “You Asians: On the Historical Role of the West and Asia Binary” in Japan after Japan, ed. Tomiko Yoda and
Harry Harootunian (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), 175.
30
Watanabi Yasushi, “Anti-Americanism in Japan” in Softpower Super Powers: Cultural and National Assets of Japan and the
United States, ed. Watanabe Yasushi and David L. McConnell (New York: M.E. Sharp Inc., 2008), 6.
31
Igarashi, 112.
10. society of secrets unfathomable to the uninitiated yet a potential source to cure the failings of Western
modernity. The Japan of the 1980s viewed itself as no longer having anything to learn from the West; it was the
West that now began to learn from the Japanese. In this case Double Dragon is an allegory of the West learning
from the East where the martial arts of the protagonists are a metaphor for Japanese management,
corporatism, production techniques, and education which during the 1970s and 1980s were seen as central to
Japan’s strong economy and managed society (kanri shakai) . Yet, the East is also deliberately positioned as the
Other. The white male is given precedence in the composition (even if an object of criticism) while the East is
signified by the presence of ornate Japanese characters that are printed atop the English title. The words “The
Revenge” never appear in Japanese on the cover. Likewise, the characters for “Double Dragon” are also printed
in English as the Japanese characters are themselves obscure. In both the Japanese and American versions, the
Japanese writing is more foreign than the English print and thus Japan is doubly exotified for both foreign and
domestic consumers. The Commodore 64 box art may have covered up the manga style of the original, but
carried over the very narrative which continued to operate underneath. In copying the exact composition, the
Commodore 64 version merely replicated the symbolism of the original, serving more as an affirmation than a
purging of the original artwork’s motifs.
Fig.8: (Left) Front cover of Double Dragon II Japanese Version
Fig. 9: (Center) Front cover of the American version of Double Dragon II
Fig. 10: (Right) Commodore 64 version of Double Dragon II
Alongside the Samurai and Geisha, perhaps no other figure better represents pre-modern Japan than
the Ninja. A simultaneous fiction of both American and Japanese influences, the Ninja has been featured in
countless action films, comic books and videogames. Always a handy antagonist, the Ninja can also serve as a
heroic figure that transcends time as he can competently navigate within contemporary society while also
utilizing ancient arts passed down for centuries to vanquish his foes. This makes the figure of the Ninja an easy
character for idolization in neo-nostalgic practices as the popular mythology of Ninja ignores the cultural
upheavals of the Meiji era and the Postwar Period which “severed such historical continuities connecting the
present with an ancient past”.32
The Ninja, never fully subsumed by modernity, represents an ancient Japan still
existing in the present. But like all Japanese neo-nostalgia, Ninja Gaiden is part of a “complex yearning to
produce a pseudo-Japan [sic]… after the destruction of the ‘good old Japan’ through the defeat in World War
II.”33
32
Hiroki Azuma, Otaku: Japan’s Database Animals, trans. Jonathan E. Abel and Shion Kono (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2001), 13.
33
Azuma, 13.
11. Fig.11: (Left) Front cover of Ninja Ryu Ken Den (1988).
Fig. 12: (Center) Front cover of VHS box for Revenge of the Ninja (1983)
Fig. 13: (Right) Front Cover for Ninja Gaiden (1989). The use of fire, an urban landscape, the display of Ninja
weaponry, and placement of the central figure appear inspired by the artwork for Revenge of the Ninja
The Japanese box art for the first Ninja Gaiden game (named Ninja Ryu Ken Den or Ninja Dragon Sword
Legend in Japan) as seen in figure 11 borrows from manga cover designs. Given the overall presentation of the
game and subject matter, this composition is a sensible choice as the action sequences of the game are
punctuated by manga-like cut scenes complete with dialogue. Stylistically, there are no references for the
viewer to determine when or where Ninja Ryu Ken Den takes place. Adding to the mystery is a bizarre abstract
figure placed behind the ninja that takes the shape of an ancient earthenware Jōmon figurine. In the painting
over of the Japanese version, the American Box art of Ninja Gaiden (Fig.13) removes these cultural contexts
rendering the figure of the ninja in a more dynamic pose familiar to American audiences. In moving away from
the Japanese composition, the American box art borrows similar stylistic elements from ninja movies made in
the United States such as Revenge of the Ninja (Fig.12) starring martial artist and actor Sho Kosugi. In this sense
the Ninja is Americanized. Despite this alteration, American consumers were still exposed to manga within the
game, which in the 1980s had largely been an unsuccessful venture on its own.34
Although the Japanese art was replaced for the American version of the game, the box art retains some
Japanese writing. Unlike Double Dragon II, the Japanese characters in Ninja Gaiden are affixed to the English
spelling for ninja and are integral to the title. This is significant for several reasons. Firstly, combining the title in
this way reinforces the hybrid nature of the game art in which the foreign image of the Ninja is rendered in an
American fashion. The use of Japanese characters also exotifies the product; by consuming the product one is
also consuming Japan. Again, unlike Double Dragon II which is presented as a Western narrative with Eastern
influences, the use of Japanese characters combined with the image of the Ninja in Ninja Gaiden signify that this
is an Eastern narrative and, therefore, players can partake in a foreign fantasy. The idea of foreignness,
however, is a matter of positionality. The term gaiden has roots in Japanese and Chinese literary culture as a
form of auxiliary or anecdotal record, typically biographical, revolving around a main story or historical event. In
contemporary usage, gaiden is used as a suffix in titles to indicate that the work is a side story or spinoff.
However, the two characters gai (foreign) and den (in this case read as legend or tale)35
are further suggestive of
the game as a foreign export and also a reference to the game’s plot. The main character in the game, Ryu
Hayabusa, travels to America as part of his quest. In this case America is the Other as indicated by the character
34
Wendy Goldberg, “The Manga Phenomenon in America” in Manga: An Anthology of Global and Cultural Perspectives,ed
Toni Johnson-Woods (New York: The Continuum International Publishing Group, 2010), 281, 282.
35
The character Den (伝)means to impart or transmit
12. gai. Even though the American version relies on the vision of the Ninja as a symbol of the East, in changing the
name from Ninja Ryu Ken Den to Ninja Gaiden in the American version this simply affirms the game’s theme of
America as the foreign Other. Thus it is not necessarily Japan which is being consumed for its exotic appeal but
a Japanese vision of America.
Fig. 14: (Left) Front and back cover of Ninja Ryu Ken Den II (1990)
Fig. 15: (Right) Front and back cover of Ninja Gaiden II (1990)
Like Contra Spirits, the Japanese version of Ninja Gaiden II (Fig.14) is a response to American artwork.
The manga influences from the first game have been removed from the cover but still appear on the back of the
box where both text and image reference the game’s narrative. This is in contrast to the American version (Fig.
15) which focuses on the game’s features and action. By contrast, the covers of the American version and
Japanese version have very few differences. The Japanese version simulates the box art of the American Ninja
Gaiden compositionally by placing the figure of the Ninja in the foreground irrespective of scale. This self-
orientalization is furthered by the image of a dragon which appears looming over what looks like New York as
indicated by twin towers to the right of the Ninja. In this case the dragon is a manifestation of Japan, a creature
ambiguously benevolent and terrifying. This is suggestive of Japan’s economic and cultural presence in the
United States in the 1980s. In mimicking the American box art from Ninja Gaiden, the cover art for Ninja Gaiden
II becomes a true cultural hybrid that is neither fully American nor Japanese yet relies on popular imaginaries of
how each sees the Other. What is actually American or Japanese about this product is simply a reduced and
stereotypical vision whereby commodities come to represent those very cultures which are supposedly
informing the product’s creation. In blending the figure of the Ninja with contemporary themes, the Ninja
Gaiden series “turns the nostalgic into a disruptive ‘anterior’ and displaces the historical present”.36
This is the
very essence of neo-nostalgia.
Shifting Representations
As the world headed into the last decade of the twentieth century, Japan experienced several social
shocks beginning with the collapse of the bubble economy in 1991 followed by the Tokyo subway gas attacks by
the Aum Shinrikyō cult in 1995, and the arrest of the 14 year old murderer known as Shōnen A in 1997.37
Jon
Woronoff’s Japan as -Anything but- Number One (1991) was quick to castigate Japan’s well managed society as
the country entered into a deep recession. These events stood opposite to the United States which had
emerged triumphant as the sole super power from the Cold War. Within this decade of increased unease, social
36
Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture(New York: Routledge, 2004),240.
37
Yoda, 21.
13. fracturing, and the encroaching economic pressures of globalization, Japan reasserted itself culturally and
economically through videogames and anime. Like the 1980s, many Japanese popular cultural productions
continued to be informed by perceptions of traditional or ancient Japan; however, in the 1990s, the pop music,
anime, manga, toys, and videogames that collectively constitute Japan’s GNC increasingly became the locus
from which Japanese culture was initially accessed by global youth. As anthropologist Anne Allison argues, “it is
not Japan in some literal or material sense that is captured and transmitted in the new global craze of Japanese
cool, but rather a particular style”.38
J-culture was the style that had emerged from domestic culture industries
in 1990s Japan and came to represent “a new level of abstraction from the concrete social context in that the
signifier of locality can be immediately…subsumed into the general economy of value underwritten by global
capital.”39
J-culture became not so much an outward projection of authentic Japaneseness (which was never the
intention) but rather the branding of Japan as product.
Selling J-culture abroad to the United States was more difficult than Asian markets despite Japan’s long
term presence within American popular culture. In such cases, Japanese firms have had to negotiate with
American distributors on how products such as anime and videogames would be presented to American
consumers. In the early part of the 1990s the tradition of mukokuseki and glocalization continued as seen in the
importation of then popular television shows such as Mighty Morphin Power Rangers and Pokémon. Scenes
involving Japanese actors without their helmets were replaced with scenes with American actors and overt signs
of Japaneseness such as Japanese script and rice balls were rotoscoped, respectively. Japan had to retreat in
order to advance. But such glocalization was not necessarily an offense as profit, rather than cultural
authenticity, was the chief aim of Japanese firms.40
Throughout the 1990s other shows appeared on public
television stations such as Dragon Ball, Sailor Moon, and Ronin Warriors which, while edited for American
viewers, projected Japan into the consciousness of American youth. But for Iwabuchi such cultural transmission
raises the question, “If it is indeed the case that the Japaneseness of Japan animation derives, consciously or
unconsciously, from its erasure of physical signs of Japaneseness, is not the Japan that Western audiences are at
long last coming to appreciate, and even yearn for, an animated, race-less and culture-less, virtual version of
‘Japan’?”41
Global flows present both a means and desire to represent culture through commodities as a profitable,
though not unproblematic, enterprise. But the glocalization of video game art and the mukokuseki nature of
many characters have proven so successful that by “the end of 1992, the Japanese computer manufacturer
Nintendo had sold some 60 million of its game machines worldwide, and Japanese-designed computer
games...formed part of the collective fantasies of a whole worldwide generation of children”.42
In the 1980s
videogames came to transmit a form of Japanese culture abroad in a way that products such as cars and
electronics did not seek to do nor Japanese popular music and movies could do. Despite being over painted and
edited, exported Japanese videogames inducted players into the attitudes and history of an actual place.
Though interpretations and recognition of Japan could shift from player to player, videogames had a far greater
effect and wider audience in terms of cultural exposure than manga or anime up to that time. Throughout the
1990s more of the original artwork of Japanese videogames began to appear. This coincided with a decrease in
the editing of Japanese anime and television programs for American audiences. As the gloss over Japanese
society eroded so too did the layers that had previously covered video game art. Ironically, however, the original
Japanese artwork began to emerge on videogame packaging during the 1990s at the same time that Japan had
38
Anne Allison, Millennial Monsters: Japanese Toys and the Global Imagination (Berkley and Los Angeles: University of
California Press, 2006), 22.
39
Yoda, 47.
40
Anne Allison, Millennial Monster, 120-122.
41
Koichi Iwabuchi, Recentering Globalization: Popular Culture and Japanese Transnationalism (Duke University Press, 2002),
33.
42
Tessa Morris-Suzuki, Re-Inventing Japan: Time, Space, Nation (New York: M.E Sharpe, Inc., 1998), 175.
14. long since disappeared. What was exposed was a system of signs which had begun to lose all meaning in their
constant circulation and reproduction as Japan increasingly became reified as an object of desire. In trying to
recover from a lost grand narrative in the post-bubble era, Japan increasingly submitted itself to cultural
commodification and in so doing Japan became located in the very products which were meant to represent it.
In essence, the distinction between Japanese commodities such as video games and Japan weakened.
Iwabuchi’s ‘virtual Japan’, a Japan as simulacrum, would become fully realized by the end of the 1990s.
Fig. 16: (Left) The character select screen for Street Fighter II. Here Ryu and Ken have been selected to fight in
Japan. Notice the Japanese orientation of the world map.
Fig. 17: (Right) The American fighters in Street Fighter II, Guile and Ken, fight in Guile’s stage: an American
airbase. The end of the Cold War triggered base closings in the U.S. Here American service men and women have
nothing better to do now that America has won the war.
No videogame better chronicles these transitions than the Street Fighter series produced by Capcom
which continuously released new Street Fighter games throughout the 1990s. The earliest of the console
games, Street Fighter 2 (1991), featured 8 playable characters from various parts of the globe: United States,
Japan, China, Russia, Brazil, and India. In the game, characters representing their respective countries vie for
dominance through martial arts bouts. These characters can also move about the globe freely to fight in locales
that serve as essentialist representations of the various characters’ homelands (Fig. 16). The composition of the
characters, the game’s objective, and the presence of global nomadism indicate that Street Fighter 2 was a
parable of globalization that recounted the post-Cold War world order. The characters Ryu (Japanese) and Ken
(American) personify American-Japan relations as they hold the ambiguous position as both rivals and allies. In
this instance, the presence of Ryu and Ken represent part of an older geopolitical order established after the
Second World War. The prominent status of these two countries is further reinforced by the presence of an
additional character from Japan (E. Honda) and the United States (Guile). The fighters from China, India, Russia,
and Brazil, by contrast, represent a then emerging new world order. Street Fighter 2 was thus a prognostication
of the future economic and political significance of these countries and their importance in redefining the world
in relation to America’s sole super power status in the early 1990s.
The box art for the Street Fighter games, like the anime of the era, was highly edited at first. In Street
Fighter 2 Turbo for Super Nintendo (Fig. 18) the original Japanese depictions of these characters (Fig. 19) have
been erased in favor of a more painterly and three dimensional approach. This technique is also implemented in
the box art for Street Fighter Alpha (Fig.20) which has a background that extends farther into space and places
characters and shadows in the composition in such a way as to create the illusion of depth—similar to the Mega
Man 2 American box art. However, the characters in Street Fighter 2 Turbo are depicted irrespective of the
background as they are placed prominently in the foreground extending out into the frame. Although the two
characters overlap they appear rigid and flat, giving the overall composition a much more two-dimensional feel.
This stands in contrast to Street Fighter Alpha which, while appearing later than Street Fighter 2 Turbo, seems to
revert back to earlier videogame composition styles.
15. Fig.18: (Left) Front cover of Street Fighter II Turbo for the Super Nintendo (USA).
Fig. 19: (Center) Front cover of Street Fighter II Turbo for Super Fanticom (Japan)
Fig. 20: (Right) Front Cover for Street Fighter Alpha for Sony Playstation (USA). Even as videogames became more
sophisticated throughout the 1990s, some American box art retained earlier art styles from the 1980s.
Interestingly, the American version of Street Fighter 2 Turbo gives Japan a prominent position in the
artwork as opposed to the American characters within the game. In this case the box art depicts a fight between
the sumo wrestler E. Honda and Thai kick-boxer Sagat in a Japanese bath. The presence of E. Honda and the
Japanese setting in the American box art accentuates Japan’s foreignness in order to appeal to consumers. For
American audiences, the image of the Sumo as a Japanese icon is not unlike that of the Ninja. In placing
E.Honda on the American box art, then, there is no need for authenticity (indeed, E.Honda’s Sumo garb looks
like a checkered picnic blanket) as he exists purely to appeal to a desire to consume the Other. Cultural signs are
detached from historicity in cultural commodification and in so doing become interchangeable and
anachronistic. How an object projects Japaneseness is what ultimately matters. Given this, the character E.
Honda represents Japan in a self-orientalized and neo-nostalgic fashion. Here the sumo wrestler serves as a sign
of Japanese tradition and ancient past continuing into the present, but the presence of kumadori (kabuki face
paint) on E. Honda’s face indicates a deliberate melding of various cultural symbols. Such a pastiche places E.
Honda more as a postmodern figure as various markers of Japanese culture are arranged irrespective of
authenticity in projecting an overall essence of Japaneseness. Looking at the Japanese box art for Street Fighter
2 Turbo, E. Honda stands out given his general lack of denationalization compared to the other characters in the
composition which share similar mukokuseki characteristics. In retaining his national origins, E. Honda becomes
a lampooned figure, an eccentric foreign character for Japanese and foreign audiences alike.
Fig. 21: Various versions of the Street Fighter game. By the end of the 1990s many versions of Street Fighter
appeared on numerous gaming platforms but all displayed the original Japanese art for the characters.
16. By the late 1990s the internet had played a significant role in transmitting J-culture globally.43
Internet
users could watch anime episodes or read manga online while also keeping in touch with the latest Japanese
fads. The unprecedented success of Pokémon also rekindled fears of Japanese cultural invasion but also
appealed to the imagination of American youth. As Anne Allison and Susan J. Napier have argued, Japan (or
rather the consumption of Japan) offered new fantasies and products to American youth who found them alien
but not alienating. Japan’s difference became a space in which American youth could project themselves and
find meaning during the turn of the 21st
century. This desire spurred some fans to find more authentic
expressions of Japaneseness in the form of original anime and the study of the Japanese language.44
For
videogames, the increased accessibility to J-culture over the internet and a demand for Japanese products such
as anime and manga without being edited resulted in the increased appearance of Japanese artwork on the
cover of videogames exported to the United States. Street Fighter games, for instance, began to appear with
the characters designed in a manga fashion (Fig. 21) thus stripping away the layers placed down by the American
box art. Still, some hesitation existed on the part of American distributors as seen in the game Suikoden (Fig.22)
which, despite being based on Chinese literature (Tales from the Water Margin), features all White characters
on the cover. Other times, the Japanese art could be circumvented by the 3-d polygon graphics of the games
themselves (Fig.23). Yet as the American coats were being removed in videogames, what was ultimately made
visible were a series of mukokuseki characters and a virtual Japan that had self-orientalized itself to sell to
consumers. Such exposure simply signified Japan’s “cultural subordination to the West” while trying to mask
that very fact in the pervasive production of Japaneseness.45
Fig. 22: (Left) Front of American Suikoden box for Playsation (1996)
Fig. 23: (Right) Front of Final Fantasy VII for Playstation (USA).
Neo-nostalgia and the New Millenium
The videogame Kabuki Quantum Fighter (1991) borrowed heavily from elements of cyberpunk fiction to
produce a plotline that augured the coming decade of Japanese cultural production. In Kabuki Quantum Fighter
the space between the virtual and real is threatened by an alien virus that has invaded the world’s central
defense computer. In order to save the real world, an American soldier volunteers to enter the computer as
code and destroy the virus. Once inside the computer’s database, the soldier, of Anglo and Japanese descent, is
reconstituted as a futuristic version of his kabuki actor ancestors. But given his presence within the database,
the soldier has no means of separating the virtual from the real as the two have collapsed into each other in his
consciousness. That is, the underlying code of the database manifests into physical environments and monsters
43
Napier, 134.
44
Anne Allison, “The Japan Fad in Global Youth Culture” in Mechademia vol.1, ed. Frenchy Lunning (Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 2006) 15.
45
Koichi Iwabuchi, Recentering Globalization, 7.
17. which the protagonist must negotiate to complete his mission—the underlying code of the database has no
direct significance, only the representations the database manifests are important.
Fig. 24: Screenshots from Kabuki Quantum Fighter. As Colonel Scott O’Connor is transferred into the database,
his avatar becomes that of a cyberpunk version of a Kabuki actor.
Symptomatic of the postmodern condition, in the collapse of national meaning in the 1990s the grand
narrative that had been built up around postwar Japan ceased to operate. Replacing the grand narrative model
is what cultural critic Hiroki Azuma calls the database model. Although cultural commodities are fragments of a
grand narrative, they are given legitimacy by that larger grand narrative operating behind them. Cultural
commodification relies on selling worldviews through several small narratives. The conceptualization of
Pokémon, for instance, was possible due to a nostalgic sense of loss of the natural world as Japan rapidly
reindustrialized after the Second World War.46
Pokémon becomes in part a small narrative that is derived from
larger narratives of postwar Japan that had dominated Japanese cultural and national identity in the second half
of the 20th
century. In the database model which began to emerge in the 1990s, signs operate autonomously
from the (cultural) code underneath. As Azuma argues, “in the postmodern database model, the surface outer
layer is not determined by the deep inner layer, the surface reveals different expressions at those numerous
moments of ‘reading up”.47
This surface layer in the database model is one of simulacra, of recycled images. In
the database model, no single grand narrative exists to regulate the mélange of cultural signs which can be
referenced and rearranged at convenience to “citationally cannibalize images of Japan”.48
Given this, the database model and neo-nostalgia go hand in hand as neo-nostalgia is a preoccupation
with the consumption of the image regardless of context or deeper meaning. The myriad of products
representing Japan such as videogames no longer signify a ‘real’ Japan in any decipherable sense but rather have
become purely self-referential—Japan becomes a simulacrum. This is not to say that such products operate
irrespective of their histories or that videogames cannot depict history in the way that cinema does (and indeed
videogames have become much more cinematic), but that history has ceased to have any meaning or function.
Rather, as Baudrillard argues in regards to cinema, videogames borrow from history in order to give us back a
history, but that such a process simply renders “the disappearance of objects in their very representation”.49
In
essence, Japan has become a hyperreal fiction that is endlessly produced resulting in what Azuma has called the
grand nonnarrative (ōkina himono-gatari) “that lacks the structures and ideologies (‘grand narratives’) [sic] that
used to characterize modern society”.50
Herein the very presence of Japan in videogames signifies the very
disappearance of any stable meaning as Japan comes to serve as the alibi by which the consumption of neo-
nostalgicized characters and settings found in videogames such as Pokémon Conquest (2012) and SumiOni
(2012) can take place. At once full of historical references, these videogames depict history not “so much
46
Millennial 201.
47
Azuma, 32.
48
Marilyin Ivy, Discourses of the Vanishing, 57.
49
Baudrillard, 45.-
50
Azuma, xvi.
18. because people believe in them or still place hope in them, but simply to resurrect the period when at least [sic]
there was history…” (Baudrillard 44). 51
Fig. 25: (Left) Front cover of Pokemon Conquest for Nintendo DS (2012)
Fig. 26: (Center) Front cover of Pokemon Nobunaga no Yabō
Fig. 27: (Right) Back cover of Nobunaga no Yabō (1983)
The Nintendo DS game Pokémon Conquest (Fig.25) or Pokémon Nobunaga no Yabō in Japan (Pokémon
Nobunaga’s Ambition) melds various historical moments without reference to any single dominating ideology.
According to the official Pokémon Conquest website: “Pokémon Conquest is a strategy game set in the Ransei
region. You play as a Warlord of the Primus Kingdom, one of the 17 Kingdoms in the Ransei region. You are
charged with the task of battling against a wide variety of powerful opponents, including the mighty Nobunaga,
whose goal is to destroy the Ransei region!”52
The various warlords players can choose from are based on
historical characters, but these figures are decontextualized as their bodies are revivified, reimagined, and
placed within the fictional Ransei region. The game is set at once in Japan and not in Japan. In the accumulation
of small narratives Pokémon becomes history while Japan’s feudal past becomes a fiction. Pokémon is far more
real and identifiable within Japanese contemporary society than the Samurai which operate as an exotic self-
orientalized Other. Seemingly anachronistic in its content, the presence of Pokémon Conquest actually serves as
a historical record: a harbinger of the database model which has replaced the consumption of grand narratives
in cultural production. The game’s historical pastiche disposes of the modernist teleology as Japan’s past and
present collapse into hyperreality. All of history can be resurrected, accessed, and recombined for the purposes
of cultural commodification as “everything is equivalent and is mixed indiscriminately in the same morose and
funeral exaltation”.53
In this case, signs come to represent only other signs of nostalgia for an old Japan,
producing images without narrative as history implodes in an expression of pseudo-sentimentality and the
marketability of the Pokémon franchise.
The original Nobunaga’s Ambition (Fig.27) served as an electronic text recounting the historical
achievements of Daimyo Nobunaga Oda. Though players could choose other Daimyo and compete to unify
Japan, the game continued to operate within the grand narrative of Japanese national identity. On the back of
the Japanese box art, Nobunaga’s portrait, despite being a modern rendering, remains faithful to historical
depictions of Nobunaga when he was alive. In the American version of Pokémon Conquest, Nobunaga’s name
has been removed completely though his semblance is prominently placed above the title. The Japanese
version of the game places his name in katakana script rather than the Kanji used for his name. In both cases
Nobunaga is purely eponymous; any relation to a real person or period is erased. However, Pokémon Conquest
is not historical fiction; rather, Pokémon Conquest circumvents historicity by borrowing from various smaller
51
Baudrillard, 44.
52
Pokemon Conquest Official Site: <http://www.pokemonconquest.com/en-us>.
53
Baudrillard, 44.
19. narratives without “a fixed historical or social point of reference”. 54
This, as Tomiko Yoda points out in
referencing Stuart Hall, is characteristic in processes of cultural commodification. Although Japanese popular
culture has been heavily influenced by the United States, globalization does not necessarily homogenize cultures
by unifying disparate cultural signs. Rather, distinct cultural representations amalgamated from various spatial
and temporal sites become manifested in the commodity form: traditional crafts, ethnic music CDs, and even
videogames.55
But this reification is not guided by a sense of reconstructing traditional or authentic notions of
cultural identity. In Pokémon Conquest that which is being construed as the traditional, in this case the Samurai,
can no longer be emancipated from the desire to manufacture traditionality –tradition becomes confined within
the signs of its own production. But as culture is subjected to commodification and global commodity flows,
culture becomes a site of never satiated desires spawning the development of new products, ever new desires,
ever new signs of consumption.
Fig. 28: Front cover of Sumioni (USA) and Sumioni Screenshot. Notice the kawaii (cute) character in the center of
the composition looking out towards the viewer.
While Pokémon Conquest is a hybrid of other videogames and a neo-nostalgic feudal Japan, Sumioni
(2012) is a complete odyssey into the virtualization of Japan. Sumioni (Ink Ogre/Demon) is similar to Kabuki
Quantum Fighter in this regard as the demon Agura navigates sumi-e (Japanese ink paintings) settings to
accomplish his mission of restoring order in Heian period (794-1185) Japan.56
The sumi-e depictions in Sumioni
are both a reference to Japanese art and their simulacra. What is novel here, then, is that videogames have
come to displace museums, maps, and education which have been used as instruments in defining the nation
and housing culture. As Japan has increasingly located itself in the realm of the virtual, any distinction between
the real and the hyperreal is futile – they are one and the same. The game’s loose connections to the power
struggles of the Heian period and Japanese animism plays to self-orientalization, but this is information is
superfluous as the game, and the images it portrays, operate only at a surface level with no need for deeper
layers for coherency. Rather, Sumioni is solely a grand non-narrative constructed for the purposes of fueling
Japan’s GNC. Contemporary Japanese videogame exports, in the fragmentation of historical narratives and
cultural images of Japan, reduce Japan to a series of dissociated clichés. But games such as Pokémon Conquest
and Sumioni are no different than other Japanese cultural commodities that have been exported to the United
States over the past three decades. Only the intensity of self-orientalization and neo-nostalgia are exceptional.
The transfer of Japanese culture (popular or otherwise) has often come in fragments decontextualized from the
larger socio-cultural milieu in which they were derived. These videogames lay bare this fact and have capitalized
upon it.
54
Yoda, 46.
55
Ibid., 44, 45.
56
Sumi-oni website. <http://www.sumioni.com>.
20. Conclusion
The videogames of the past twenty-five years certainly differ in technological sophistication but of more
importance is how videogames have changed in regards to shifting attitudes and responses to transcultural
flows. The graphic elements of videogames, as with any art, are a reflection of particular moments in time. In
contemporary Japanese popular cultural production, the global fascination with Japanese kawaii (cute), for
instance, has changed how characters are created and rendered. This has resulted in the increased presence of
more puerile or coquettish characters in videogames, and compositions using brighter more solid colors as
opposed to those seen in the 1980s and early 1990s which tended to place more emphasis on hypermasculine
characters and rougher rendering styles. Yet Japanese cute, with its global appeal, has roots in Disney and thus
American popular culture.57
But throughout time mukokuseki, self-orientalization, and neo-nostalgia have
remained common devices used in creating videogames and the corresponding artwork due to Western
influences, a desire to sell Japanese videogames abroad, and as a form of postmodern play.
Although the videogames mentioned in this paper are highly diverse in terms of genre, all speak to the
influences of globalization and how “[a]rt in a postmodern world does not belong to a unitary frame of
reference, nor to a project or a Utopia. The plurality of perspectives leads to a fragmentation of experience, the
collage becoming a key artistic technique of our time”.58
The collage that is Japanese videogame art is highly
complicated and made all the more convoluted by Japan’s relationship to the United States and the glocalization
of videogames for American consumers. Since the Meiji period the Japanese have had to adapt to and learn
from the West, and are much more familiar with American customs and perceptions than Americans are with
Japanese ones. Therefore, it is unsurprising videogames have continued to depict Japan as an exotified Other.
However, it would be inaccurate to label the art of Japanese videogames as purely the product of Western
acculturation. As this paper has argued, the painting over of Japanese videogame art shows a clear indication on
the part of American distributors to remove elements regarded as too foreign for American consumers. Yet this
‘foreignness’ became increasingly desirable over time to the point of becoming perfunctory in Japanese
videogames. Whether or not the art of Japanese videogames constitutes an authentic expression of Japanese
culture is the wrong question to ask. The virtualization of Japan and the role of culture industries in
commodifying and exporting culture are indicative of the current cultural moment for both the United States
and Japan. The more important question is how much of the pentimento remains and what is yet to be
revealed? That is, what layers are left unexposed and what can we learn from them? Only time will tell.
57
Sharon Kinsella, “Cuties in Japan” in Women, Media, and Consumption in Japan, ed. Lise Skov and Brian Moeran
(Honolulu: University of Hawai’I Press, 1995), 241
58
Steinar Kvale, “Themes of Postmodernity” in The Truth about Truth: De-Confusing and Re-Constructing the Postmodern
World, ed. Walter Truett Anderson (New York: Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 1995), 23.
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