Routledge Contemporary Japan Series. London; New York: Routledge [an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business], 2019. 294 pp. US$149.95, cloth. ISBN 9780367111380.
Rachael Hutchinson is one of the world’s foremost experts on Japanese videogames. She began her career as a scholar of modern Japanese literature, and she applies the same level of critical analysis and cultural insight to Japanese Culture Through Videogames, one of the first academic monographs to treat Japanese games as texts that can be read and understood as legitimate works of creative expression. This book is the result of years of dedicated research, as well as conversations with industry professionals and the author’s experiences teaching undergraduate classes on Japanese games. In addition to serving as a fantastic introduction to some of the most celebrated and influential digital texts of the past thirty years, Japanese Culture Through Videogames offers a brilliant examination of popular views on key social and political issues in contemporary Japan.
Japanese Culture Through Videogames is divided into three main sections. Part I, “Japanese Culture as Playable Object,” tackles the subject of how the “Japaneseness” of Japanese games is expressed and how such constructions have been received abroad. Part II, “Ideology and Critique in Japanese Games,” is primarily concerned with the representation of contemporary social issues, including the shifting gender roles within the family and the debate concerning nuclear energy. Part III, “History, Memory, and Re-Imagining War,” documents the ways in which Japanese games have handled the legacy of the Pacific War, from guilt and victimhood to the celebration of national identity and martial technologies.
Although the individual chapters are thematically linked, each stands on its own as a discrete argument. The first two chapters in particular serve as an excellent introduction to the book’s larger project, which is to investigate the cultural contexts of games as textual objects created by Japanese developers, programmers, artists, and writers.
Chapter 1, “Katamari Damacy: Nostalgia and Kitsch,” is a detailed illustration of how games originating in Japan tend to be viewed as “Japanese” by non-Japanese gamers and gaming journalists. The chapter also shows how these ideas regarding “Japaneseness” often overlook deeper elements of cultural specificity that may not be readily apparent to players and critics with little knowledge of Japanese culture. In other words, the cultural work being done by the game developers is frequently passed off as mere weirdness or exoticism in English-language gaming journalism, not to mention the public responses and assessments posted within online gaming communities.
Chapter 2, “Packaging the Past in Ōkami,” continues this discussion regarding the role of Japanese cultural elements in videogames. Unlike Katamari Damacy, which is more abstract in its gameplay and imagery, Ōkami is based on Japanese folklore and mythology drawn from Shintō religious traditions, with the player guiding a white wolf acting as the avatar of the sun goddess Amaterasu. Although American and European reviews of Ōkami have emphasized its “Japaneseness,” Hutchinson demonstrates how the imagined mythological history of Japan has been carefully curated by the game developers, who portray the characters, locations, and events in their fantasy-themed version of Japan as universal and unproblematic even as they present the game’s narrative as the biased interpretation of a character who accompanies the player through the story.
The second and third sets of chapters hone in on specific aspects of Japanese history, culture, and society while offering critical readings of key texts in the field of Japanese games. In chapter 5, “Nuclear Discourse in Final Fantasy,” Hutchinson discusses how “the anti-nuclear ideology of FFVII is expressed not only through the main narrative, but also through item usage, battle dynamics and the manipulation of player agency” and concludes that “there is much in FFVII that points to a concern for our own planet and the wasteful use of natural resources” (139). Chapter 6, “Bioethics Meets Nuclear Crisis,” is about how nuclear anxieties have influenced portrayals of issues related to bioethics, specifically genetic mutation and manipulation, which are common concerns in horror games such as those in the Resident Evil series. Chapter 8, “Hiroshima and Violence in Metal Gear Solid,” deals with public conversations surrounding Japan’s involvement in geopolitical conflicts and presents strong evidence for continuing artistic and discursive resistance to overseas military operations and the neo-liberal policies guiding them. Hutchinson presents text from creator interviews and scenes from the games themselves in order to expose and unpack ideological positions that become much more meaningful and nuanced when seen from the perspective of their country of origin.
One of the major contributions of Japanese Culture Through Videogames to the field of Japanese studies is its careful description of the plot and gameplay of each title under discussion. Due to rapidly shifting changes in technology, many games that were perceived as masterpieces when they were first released may no longer be accessible to scholars. Hutchinson documents the stories, characters, and gameplay elements of her chosen texts with a level of accuracy and concision that is especially commendable given the length, depth, and convoluted plots of many of the games under discussion. As a result, the reader does not need to have played these games in order to understand and benefit from Hutchinson’s analysis and contextualization.
As Japanese Culture Through Videogames establishes, games are just as valuable to the study of contemporary Japan as fiction and films, and this monograph is highly recommended for scholars of Japan and East Asia who wish to understand not only the content but also the ideologies and discursive strategies of a key media form, as well as how popular discourses regarding social issues are constructed and spread among younger generations. Japanese Culture Through Videogames is an indispensable resource for anyone working on games and contemporary media, and the clarity of Hutchinson’s writing helps to make this book accessible to any fan of Japanese games who wants to take their understanding and appreciation to a deeper level.
Kathryn Hemmann
George Mason University, Fairfax