Samurai to Cyberpunk to... Mascots?
I am teaching a class this semester on Orientalism, specifically focused on representations of East Asians in Western-produced media and cultural products. We have spent a lot of time on the historical context: students have read most of Marco Polo's The Travels and we've discussed the Opium Wars and the broader context of nineteenth century European and American imperialism in some detail. In the last few classes we've sped towards the present, or close to it: a live performance by Nicki Minaj of her song "Chun-Li" and Liu Simu's hosting of SNL in 2021. The idea behind the class, in part, is to break down the historical context around racial stereotypes of Asian-Americans and Asians in the US. Though we look to analyze the process of how this actually works (i.e. orientalism) as our main goal. So, whenever possible, we are focusing on process rather than content. At least, I hope we are. The content can be incredibly compelling. For many reasons.
This week I fly to New Orleans to present a talk at the annual meeting of the Popular Culture Association. Thinking about my planned talk - a discussion of how we present and receive futures and pasts of Japan in video games - has me thinking anew about the next book project. The big question for me right now is: do I try and write a book about historical experience and how video games interact with that idea across different themes, geographical locations and time periods? Or do I commit to just writing about Japan?
I'm thinking this in part because I'm teaching a class that discusses China, Japan and Korea a lot, and it only reinforces the fact that when talking about these places, at least in a historical sense, I actually know what I'm talking about. It's also hard to avoid coming back to Japan again and again: visions of future urban utopias and their attendant soiled undercarriages in Cyberpunk 2077; medieval Japan as a beautiful idyll inseparable from the violence that inhabits it; Kojima and international instability and the fragility of democracy and peace in the face of technology. All my favorite ideas, so far, bring in Japan. I am starting to think I just need to write about Japan.
Promise Mascot Agency is doing nothing to hold back this trend. Set in Showa Japan... kind of... with a visuals filter and aesthetic to match, this game excels at leveraging absurdity towards legitimacy; that is, the game is weird (not a pejorative, here) because it's weird, not because it's Japanese. And though its "weirdness" clearly exists as a direct line out from Japanese culture - e.g. the existence of corporate, city and prefecture "mascots" in the first place - it has an internal logic of its own. To an extent it succeeds in having its cake and eating it too, with the kind of high flying loose wackiness, real and imagined, of Japanese television and entertainment made for Japanese people, joined by an aesthetic that feels very 2020s and very at home in the current indie games landscape.
It probably helps that I genuinely want my own Kei truck in real life.
A lot of this success comes, I think, from grounding the narrative in gameplay and setting that games have not often shown much interest in, at least in the West. Yes, our protagonist is (ex-)Yakuza, but it's a fractured, weakened Yakuza reeling from the anti-Yakuza laws of the early 1990s, and possibly late 2000s and early 2010s. It's not terribly clear which of these laws the game references: we are told we in Showa Japan, which ended in 1989. But then again, this is where the game tends to shine: details in the particular can be elided but the sense of theme is clear and consistently reinforced throughout story and mechanics.
Kaso-machi, the game's primary setting, is an economically ossifying and oppressed town or small city, cut adrift in the wake of the megalopolises of postwar/early twenty-first century urbanized Japan. It has a corrupt mayor holding back state funds intended to help ordinary people, an abandoned, decaying public mall, and a regular train of competing Kei and Kei-like vehicles on the roads, small locomotives of industry that in practice drive the real life working class engines of Japanese industry.
The themes of urban decay and capitalism drifting are everywhere. As the manager of the Promise Mascot Agency your former enforcer protagonist has a remarkably pro-labor streak. Your mascots are entitled to percentages of the overall take on the jobs to which you send them, a share of profits that typically has to be negotiated higher to secure their hiring in the first place. Once you have hired them, they often remark they are likely not being valued appropriately. But maybe I'm just not a generous boss.
As I plan to talk about at the PCA, games have become very confident in talking about various shades of the "Way of the Warrior" samurai Japan. Games are also quite at home dropping futuristic motifs into visions of tech-metro landscapes. Promise Mascot Agency talks about a post-Bubble Economy Japan, which in the English-speaking games world at least is new. It is also quite difficult to do, and maybe needed an indie genre-jumping management sim to go there.
I think a big question we don't often answer is why we are so interested in the samurai and what, exactly, we are either trying to say about them or using them to say. Promise Mascot Agency says some pretty clear things, about how to value people and the importance of community in ways that are simultaneously localized in the game's Japanese setting and more universal (and less tired and annoying) than classic honor/death/loyalty tropes. Here, declarations of devotion of loyalty are typically played for laughs - but you're expected to laugh with the character doing the declaring. And ultimately, they make the commitment all the same.
None of which is to say games like Ghost of Tsushima or Assassin's Creed Shadows are bad. I don't think they are, and each are worthy of deeper conversation. But Promise Mascot Agency feels fundamentally different, and apart from all the other things the game does well, the differences from other games set in Japan feel meaningful. At the very least it gives me something else to talk about besides the narrative dangers of constantly invoking honor and the willingness to die, or the relentless ubiquity of bangs in the femme hairstyles of the future.
I'll let you all know how the talk goes!