Introducing Japanese Popular Culture Edited by Alisa Freedman and Toby Slade 1 Routledge 1~ Taylor&. Francls Group LONDON AND NEW YORK First published 2018 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2018 selection and editorial matter, Alisa Freedman and Toby Slade; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Alisa Freedman and Toby Slade to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. 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The publishers would be grateful to hear from any copyright holder who is not here acknowledged and will undertake to rectify any errors or omissions in future editions of this book. 80 Rachael Hutchinson as a message that the developers want to convey. This is especially true for games like FFVII which incorporate self-reflexivity into the text in creative 8 The Cute Shall Inherit the ways. The embodied experience of gameplay combines with the linear plot Earth of the JRPG to force the player into decision-making practices with which they might not always agree, giving a self-conscious quality to the gamepl~ Post-Apocalyptic Posthumanity in If this does not always result in internalization of the developer's ideology\ it certainly necessitates engagement with it. FFVII may be read as a site of Tokyo Jungle convergence between the historical reality of anti-nuclear discourse and the increasing self-reflexivity of a maturing narrative form. The two processeti Kathryn Hemmann work on each other, and inevitably on the player, to create an ideologic4 impact through the lived experience of the game text. Alan Weisman's 2007 thought experiment The World without Us imagines a Notes world in which humankind has suddenly disappeared from the face of the 1 I thank Andrew DiMola and Kevin West for their insights into FFIV and FFVI. earth. The roofs of houses and apartment buildings collapse as weeds and On nuclear discourse in FFX (see Hutchinson 2014). trees push their way up through concrete and asphalt. Native flora and fauna 2 On atomic bomb literature see Treat (1995); on atomic bomb cinema see Shapii;:g proliferate as they intermix with exotic imported species used for decoration (2002). Contributors to Robert Jacobs' (2010) volume examine a range of arl and kept as pets, and new ecosystems emerge. Shells of automobiles rust si­ forms with respect to nuclear metaphors and messages. 3 The kanji characters are "magic" and "clarity," while "clarity" comprises the lently away while the steel frames of bridges and skyscrapers remain, even as characters for "sun" and "light/radiance." While the transliteration Mako is they are grown over with flowering vines and kudzu. "Central Park's grass more accurate, I follow conventions of the localized game, using terms and char­ is gone," he writes: acter names that appear onscreen in the English language version 4 AVALANCHE and SOLDIER are capitalized in the English language vi A maturing forest is in its place, radiating down former streets and sion, occasioning discussion on fan forums (GameFAQs 2011). The capitali tion probably reflects the fact that in Japanese, the words appear as katakana :l invading empty foundations. Coyotes. red foxes, and bobcats have thereby stand out from the surrounding text. brought squirrels back into the balance with oak trees tough enough 5 All quoted dialogue comes from the localized U.S. version of the game. The to outlast the lead we deposited, and after 500 years, even in a warm­ dialogue appears in text boxes when characters speak (RPGAMER 1998). ing climate the oaks, beeches, and moisture-loving species such as ash 6 These lines are spoken randomly each time the player encounters one of these dominate. characters. 7 Hasegawa (2004: 82) sees anti-nuclear protest as one part of the anti-pollutiol (Weisman 2007: 44) movement advocating green energy, one of many grassroots environmental movements inJapan. This is how Weisman pictures New York City after the departure of human­ 8 Retro Gamer (2011: 25, 28) describes the death as a "defining moment" in "the kind, but it could just as easily be a description of Tokyo Jungle (Tokyo janguru), RPG that changed the genre," a "shocking, sad, and brilliant" move that m~de an open-world urban survival game published for the PlayStation 3 game FFVII "enormously influential," for many players "the first videogame narrauvl to leave a mark on them." console (and digitally released over the PlayStation Network in Region 1 ter­ 9 Some argue that player actions change the game to such an extent that we should ritories) in 2012. In this game, the player takes on the role ofa solitary animal think of them as co-authors (Tavares et al. 2005). or pack of animals fighting to stay alive on the mean streets of Shibuya after 10 James Newman (2013: 88) argues for player engagement rather than passiviti humanity has mysteriously vanished (see Chapter 32 for more information on during the cut-scene, as a "critical, reflective space." Shibuya). The railway bridges are intact, but there are no trains. The lettering on the signs hanging beside the unbroken windows is legible, but everything is covered with dust and grime. The game's fully interactive environments provide a striking visual contrast between the cold gray concrete and metal structures human beings have left behind and the lush greenery that has begun to overtake them. As in Weisman's visualization of a depopulated Manhattan, there is a thrillingjuxtaposition between the player's understand­ ing of Shibuya as a thriving metropolis and the game's invitation to view The Cute Shall Inherit the Earth 83 82 Kathryn Hemmann familiar landmarks through the eyes of a nonhuman animal focus_ed not on Cuteness as a Catalyst for Affective Gameplay the acquisition of consumer goods but rather on t~e means of surv1v~. The mascot for Tokyo Jungle is a tiny, fluffy Pomeranian dog, one of the Japanese videogames have featured a mult1t~de of ap_ocalypt~c and first animals the player is able to control and a lone spot of cuteness against post-apocalyptic scenarios. Well-known examples mclude N~ntendo s 2002 a dreary urban backdrop. The cute, or kawaii, aesthetic and related sub­ open-world adventure game The Legend of Zelda: The. Win~ Waker and cultures of contemporary Japan are well known (see Chapter 35); yet it Square Enix's 2009 role-playing game Final Fantasy.XIII, m which the play­ may be difficult to associate the survival-of-the-fittest struggle for life in er's goal is not to prevent an apocalypse from occurnng but rather to come t? post-apocalyptic Tokyo with the image of "a haven of play and nostal­ terms with an apocalypse that has already occurred (see Cha~ter 7). ~hats gized childhood" associated with mascot characters such as Hello Kitty especially interesting about Tokyo Jungle is that it wa~ relea_sed m Japan m the and Rilakkuma (Yano 2013b: 11). The cuteness factor comes into play June of 2012, a little more than a year after the tnple disaster earthquake, with the fifty species of animals that the player can choose to control, tsunami, and nuclear meltdown on March 11, 2011. Furthermore, the game which range from pet dogs and horses to lions and elephants. Even the eschews stylishly rendered graphics and instead encourages its player to enter largest of these animals appears tiny against the Shibuya skyscrapers, and an environment saturated with gritty realism, with area maps closely mod­ each has endearing characteristics, such as the whining noises it makes eled on the urban scenery and layout of the Shibuya Station vicin~ty and t~e when hungry and the happy yips and chirps it makes when satisfied. Each surrounding district. Tokyo Jungle's producer and distributor, Studio Japan, ts of these animals has a set of strengths and weaknesses that affect gameplay a well-known and well-respected team with direct ties to no less than Sony in a rock-paper-scissors configuration (e.g., an animal with low stealth and Computer Entertainment, which published the game. ~hy wo~ld such a attack power, such as the sheep, might have high stamina and an increased major media development studio release a high-profile tttle featun~g a f~n­ resistance to environmental toxicity). The game's Japanese language and tasy disaster so shortly after a real disaster whose real effects were still bemg English language promotional video trailers promise players that they felt and analyzed across Japan and across the ocean? Why does the game will be able to hunt for food, flee from danger, and generate offspring.