Playing with Pain: The Politics of Asobigokoro in Enzai Falsely Accused Playing with Pain: The Politics of Asobigokoro in Enzai Falsely Accused Tsugumi Okabe and Jérémie Pelletier-Gagnon Abstract The genre of boys’ love (BL), which generally refers to a body of works that depict fictional relationships between beautiful “boys,” is produced for and consumed mainly by women in Japan. Ludic expressions of sexuality and gender unique to BL have gained popularity on a global scale but have also drawn negative attention. In this article, we employ the concept of asobigokoro (playful spirit/heart) to highlight the importance of regional ideas of play and playfulness in game analysis. We argue that asobigokoro functions as a kind of counter-discourse as it privileges non- Eurocentric ways of knowing, understanding, and “playing” with representations of sexuality. Game analysis through an asobigokoro lens enriches the field of regional gaming by drawing on Japanese sociopolitical contexts to situate a reading of Japanese ludic representations. Asobigokoro stresses the importance of understanding cultural variations of “play” and “playfulness” in order to make sense of “taboo” subjects in culturally nuanced ways. In our textual analysis of Enzai: Falsely Accused, we discover that the simultaneous appropriation and subversion of violent and sexually explicit content, which characterizes the game’s asobigokoro, can be traced to Japanese feminist forms of asobi (play), which are rooted within the Yaoi tradition. 1. Introduction Among the various efforts to promote greater rights for women in Japan, in February 2016, the UN Committee for the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) made a plea for banning “the sale of video games or cartoons involving rape and sexual violence against girls and women.” According to CEDAW, “stereotypes continue to be the root causes of sexual violence against women, and pornography, video games and animation products such as manga promote sexual violence against women and girls” (UN CEDAW 2016, 5, item 20b). In response to the ban, Kumiko Yamada, of the Japanese Women’s Institute of Contemporary Media and Culture, published an opinion letter in which she argued that prohibiting the sale of videogames Journal of the Japanese Association for Digital Humanities, vol. 4, No. 1, p. 37 Playing with Pain: The Politics of Asobigokoro in Enzai Falsely Accused and other media containing “controversial” content ultimately thwarts the individual and/or collective efforts made by women who have contributed to their cultural production and legacy (Yamada 2016). In the blog posted to the web page of the Women’s Institute of Contemporary Media Culture, Yamada also critiqued the implicit sexism that underpins the “feminist” aims of the protocol by making note of how “men” are also victims of sexual violence, as in many hentai and boys’ love (BL) and eroge (erotic games) that play with homoerotic themes and content.1 Yamada emphasizes the need for regional perspectives to facilitate a culturally meaningful dialogue concerning fictional representations of sex and violence in Japanese popular culture. Bjarke Liboriussen and Paul Martin (2016) have drawn attention to a growing trend in the study of video games through a sociocultural lens that emphasizes the importance of understanding video games from within the cultural center of production. Coining the term “regional game studies” to locate this perspective, Liboriussen and Martin define it as “scholarship that explicitly situates itself in a particular locality” but where “such situatedness intersects with the power- geometries that cut across the local, national, regional and global.” We employ “regional gaming” as a conceptual framework to investigate the production of ludic expressions and representations in Japanese erotic video games. If the term “regional” in regional game studies “allows us to hold onto the reality that game studies does have a center—a concentration of intellectual resources in Western Europe and North America” (Liboriussen and Martin 2016), then the importance of regional concepts— “concepts that have been developed in non-Western epistemologies and social formations” (Liboriussen and Martin 2016)—in academic scholarship speaks for itself. However we advocate for applying regional concepts beyond academia to address international politics regarding the regulation of Japanese video games. In this article, we seek to widen the critical scope of regional game studies by applying asobigokoro, a Japanese concept of playfulness, in our case study of Enzai: Falsely Accused. Enzai: Falsely Accused (Enzai hereafter) is a Japanese visual novel PC game developed by Langmaor (a brand division of WillPlus, Ltd., a dōjin game production company). The game is co-produced by Yura, who directed and handled the game’s illustrations, and Yūma, the game’s scenario writer. Released on May 23, 2002, in Japan and January 25, 2006, in America (as the first licensed Yaoi game by JAST USA), Enzai tells a story of a young boy named Guys who is wrongfully accused and sentenced to life imprisonment for a murder that he did not commit. Much of the 1 See entry for Yamada for full transcript. Journal of the Japanese Association for Digital Humanities, vol. 4, No. 1, p. 38 Playing with Pain: The Politics of Asobigokoro in Enzai Falsely Accused gameplay takes place within a prison where Guys is repeatedly tortured and raped by other “male” inmates all the while trying to find evidence to prove his innocence. In countries such as Australia where Enzai has been banned, 2 the game’s graphic representation of both physical and psychological abuse, when taken out of its cultural context of play (asobi), runs the risk of conveying distorted impressions about morality (or the lack thereof) in Japan, perpetuating a discourse of cultural otherness that is characteristic of orientalist narratives. Heeding the call of Yamada’s observations, this article begins with a working definition of asobigokoro from which we frame our textual analysis of Enzai by identifying some of its ludic elements. Having laid our conceptual foundation, we then contextualize Enzai within the wider tradition of Yaoi and otaku culture.3 We conclude by outlining some of the limitations and potentialities of asobigokoro as we consider the challenges that might lie ahead. 2. Asobigokoro, Gender, and Gamic Realism The Japanese term asobigokoro is an ambiguous one. It is comprised of play (asobi) and heart/spirit (kokoro) and can be translated as playfulness, or a playful heart or spirit. The Japanese Kōjien dictionary defines asobigokoro as a desire to play for play’s sake but with (critical) distance (asobi hanbun no kimochi).4 The term also connotes a quality of leisure (yutori) that is characterized by a sense of witticism, lightheartedness (sharekke no aru kokoro), 5 and even a degree of mischief (itazura). We use asobigokoro to describe games that intersect the boundaries of play and parody. The asobigokoro quality of a game is not only manifest in its “fun factor,” but also marked by its attention to detail, craftsmanship, and creativity. Despite its strong presence in everyday Japanese culture, the notion of asobigokoro is not a term usually subjected to critical examination. While asobi may seem contrary to the widely held view of the Japanese as workaholics, Takeshi Moriya (1984) points out in the preface of The Playful Spirit of the Japanese People that it is not a matter of whether Japanese people are good at play (asobi jōzu) or bad at play 2 “Enzai: Falsely Accused.” 2002. Refused-Classification.com: Censorship in Australia. 21 Aug. 2009. Accessed September 7, 2018. https://www.refused-classification.com/censorship/games/e.html or https://www.refused-classification.com/censorship/games/a-to-z-listing.html. 3 In the translators’ introduction to Hiroki Azuma’s Otaku: Japan’s Database Animals, Jonathan E. Abel and Shion Kono (2011) describe otaku as “those Japanese, usually males and generally between the ages of 18 and 40, who fanatically consume, produce, and collect comic books (manga), animated films (anime), and other products related to these forms of popular visual culture and who participate in the production and sales of derivative fan merchandise” (xv). 4 Kōjien, 2nd ed. (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1977), s.v. “asobigokoro.” 5 Daijiten, 2nd ed. (Tokyo: Kodansha, 1989), s.v. “asobigokoro.” Journal of the Japanese Association for Digital Humanities, vol. 4, No. 1, p. 39 Playing with Pain: The Politics of Asobigokoro in Enzai Falsely Accused (asobi heta) but that they like to play (asobi suki). Historically speaking, asobi has been associated with the sacred in Japanese culture and participating in the ludic activities of the Shinto shrines was believed to have been a way for one to reach the divine (Yoshida et al. 1987). According to María-Dolores Rodríguez del Alisal (2002), ludic attitudes toward creativity (tsukuru) sit at a crossroads of playfulness and religiosity whereby the joy that one feels in the process of making something is as great as seeing the final product itself. In relation to Enzai, we can assume that the process involved in making the game was “fun” as the game’s grotesqueness is over the top (as we will later discuss). Japanese ludic expressions of sexuality, particularly within the context of erotic video games, are designed to entice, provoke, and unsettle. Raveri (2002) points out that because play is also “constrained within the institutional matrices of power and