6.21

 About to replay “Song of Life” in preparation for the upcoming “Gaiden” and, writing with the idea unpacking Kryu, the Yakuza and morality, a little bit. 

Briefly: a main conceit is that Kiryu never kills anyone, but this is only credible if every gangster in Japan is Wile E. Coyote and/or there is a team of the best trauma doctors on the planet, just out of site of the camera, in every moment of the Yakuza universe. Also, in order to reach the conclusions that certain specific actions of Kryu’s never killed anyone, you have to adopt a more “western” view of causation than I believe is employed by actual Yakuza. 

Specifically, at the end of Yakuza 2 Ryuji Goda succumbs to a lot of injuries, some, but not all, of which were sustained in at least two epic fist fights with Kryu that the two engaged in by mutual consent in the period directly before Goda’s death. To a Westerner, there are two big reasons that Goda’s death is not Kryu’s fault: 1) Ryuji started or at least was a willing participant in the fights, and 2) the beatings that Kiryu administered were not the SOLE cause of Ryuji’s death. On the other hand I have reason to believe that an actual Yakuza would view the situation more simply: Ryuji died after Kiryu kicked his ass, so Ryuji’s death is on Kryu. At the very least, there were times when Kiryu could have been attempting life saving measures and was, instead, punching Ryuji in the face. 

YAKUZA 6

-Has it been five years since I played this fucker? I’ve picked up enough Japanese since that I am sure that the translation is ass, but don’t actually know what they are saying (I have not picked up any Japanese)

Case Study in Homicide: Saijima Tiaga

Saijima, introduced as a playable character in Yakuza 4, was sent to jail before the events of Yakuza 0 for having killed eighteen men in an awesome assassination that draws heavily on Chow Yun Fat’s great hit scenes in Better Tomorrow and The Killer. However it is eventually revealed that Saijima’s guns were (without his knowledge) loaded with rubber bullets, he never killed anyone, and the whole situation made far less sense than one would have thought possible. Thus the taboo on letting you be a murderer is kept intact, although there are periods when both the player and the characters believe that Saijima did in fact kill the people in the ramen shop. 

Saijima’s case is fascinating to the Western justice system because he committed the guilty action (actus rea—firing the guns at the people) with the requisite mental state (mens rea—he was consciously trying to kill them) – and situations where you posses the mens rea and perform the actus rea and are not in fact guilty are worth paying attention to. He is at the very least guilty of eighteen counts of attempted murder/ first degree assault (which, in many places, carry the same criminal consequences because they can be extremely hard to differentiate from each other)

Anyway, Yakuza 5 and Yakuza 6, both reference the fact that he was in jail for killing eighteen people, without getting into the particulars of if he actually did it. This, I guess, actually makes sense, because the other option is to get massively sidetracked with the incoherent plot of Yakuza 4. But it also sidesteps the issue of murder in a way that seems kind of cheep: Sijima keeps some of the cache of coolness and a sense of guilt from his crime, but it is a manageable guilt that, once the truth is reveled, is different from the irrevocable guilt reserved for people who kill people. This also tracks, I guess, because Saijima did in fact take the requisite actions with the requisite mental state to be a murderer, but didn’t kill anyone, and thus, can’t be satisfactorily placed in a binary committed a homicide/ did not commit a homicide framework. But it still has the unseemly effect of riding murder’s coat tails, without actually taking the risks of having a major character be a murderer.