6.28

 

Saved Yuta, did a LOT of exposition, and am now playing arcade games while I think about getting ready for more exposition and a trip back to Onomichi.

We are part way through Takeshi Kitano’s ‘bust out,’ and in the beginning of the end of the game, and I want to be careful. 

Kitano earlier seemed like a kindly goofball Yakuza-- a type we are pretty familiar with. He was charming, and weird and it was cool that he was TAKESHI KITANO, but it was possible that he was doing not a lot of work, just in it for an obvious brand synergy and an easy paycheck. In the last couple chapters he has seemed more competent, more on top of things than we had realized but having the celebrity turn out to be a bit more of a hero is a not shocking development. 

However, triad boss Big Lo has just dropped the truth bomb that Takeshi Kitano is not just a funny eater of ice cream and protector of babies, he is also a scary ass, murdering, Takeshi Kitano motherfucker.

In one of MANY ‘I really wish I knew exactly everything about every word used in this moment,’ moments Big Lo-- a native Chinese speaker speaking in Japanese-- refers to Kitano as a reptile. “I never knew Chairman Iwammi had such a reptile in his employ.” It’s an awesome thing to say, I wish I knew exactly how it worked in the original.

In the next chapter we are going to get a lot more of Kitano’s story-- and it’s a good one-- so now I am looking at how he functions in the narrative/Yakuza-verse more broadly-- and then a little bit more about what it means to be Takeshi Kitano. 

Structurally, Kitano already had a lot in common with the small town Yakuza patriarch from 3, and he is about to pick up some major commonalities with Shintaro Kazama, Kiryu’s Yakuza mentor. In a lot of ways they are just swapping out two of their less good characters with someone better, and since both of these are progenitor figures, for Kiryu, what we are essentially doing is giving him an upgrade in linage. It is also keeping with the game’s theme and project by giving Kiryu, in what was at the time a send off, a grounding in something a little more real than the ephemeral goofieness that had largely defined his earlier adventures. 

It also is another very direct tie to Yakuza cinema and while the similarities between the films and the games are many, the differences are probably more important. And these differences are pretty clearly illustrated by Takeshi Kitano,who-- to everyone’s credit-- REMAINS Takeshi Kitano, even as he steps into a video game and makes certain concessions to the genre. 

Case Study in Homicide: Takeshi Kitano (screen persona)

The difference between ‘the Kitano Yakuza persona’ and Kitano the entertainer is crucial, because how Takeshi Kitano feels about Takeshi Kitano is what MAKES him Takeshi Kitano. 

Particularly, Kitano the entertainer is on record as saying that in his portrayal of Zatoich, the most heroic and famous Yakuza of all time, he considers Zatoichi to be the villain, because he rolls into town and kills a bunch of people, and while this seems righteous, the truth is he could have simply not done that, and many lives would have been spared.

[NB Zatoichi, blind swordsman/masseuse, is a Yakuza, which might be confusing for Westerners; we tend to think of the Yakuza as modern phenomenon, whose activities are readily identifiable as organized-crime adjacent, but they go back to the samurai period, and what they do is legitimately confusing. It’s unclear how much they discuss the fact that Zatoichi is Yakuza in Japanese and it is just lost in translation, or if it is an either minor or obvious detail to a Japanese audience. The original Zatoichi character from the 1960s is probably a significant Kiryu progenitor, being probably (?) one of the first Yakuza to untap their potential as an improbably-good-at-everything protector of humanity.]

So, Kitano the Yakuza is a rare portrayal of a killer that tries to neither minimize nor excuse the killing. The character (screen Kitano) is either completely over morality or just pro-murder-- but most of all they certainly are not about to say a bunch of words and give up any clues about what makes them tick. It is entirely on the audience to figure out if they are ok with this. 

Yakuza-Kitano is a man who kills men; even when he is not portraying an official Yakuza, the weight of being Takeshi Kitano propels him into pointless, fatal violence. You see in this in Fireworks/Hana-bi, where his character is actually an ex-cop, and his motivation seems throughly benign: he wants money to care for his injured friends and dying wife. But the end is always death; no one survives, including a whole bunch of Yakuza who Takeshi Kitano murders for essentially no reason. 

And, when he crosses over into video games he is still a killer, even though the Yakuza series is pretty firmly and consistently anti-killing. We are about to find out that he killed a ton of people, and the one big difference between Screen Kitano and Game Kitano is that Game Kitano is willing to talk about feeling conflicted about it. 

Kiwami 2 (the game released next after Yakuza 6) features Susume Terajima, normally type cast as Kitano’s Yakuza minion, as a Non Playable Character, and this character is also a killer. The message is clear: Yakuza cinema is about violence and death, and when actors from film show up in video games they must bring death with them; the games on the other hand, are about something else. [video games are possibly where immortality went to die, when the after-life stopped being government policy].

The Yakuza games are a fantasy about a world where the same sixth sense that lets Zatoichi carve people up despite being blind lets Kiryu slam guy’s heads into the sidewalk without killing them. 

Thus the paradox of the whole franchise: the games are a prayer for cartoon immortality but they are built on a foundation of films given over to the celebration of violent death and the men who bring it about. 

It’s the beautiful thing about Yakuza cinema: when the real Yakuza were more of a presence in Japanese society they must have killed relatively few people (especially compared to other organized crime syndicates) because Japan had one of the lowest murder rates on the planet well before the recent Yakuza crackdowns. But the cinematic Yakuza not only must be a killer but a proud killer. [there is probably not any connection between the fact that the Japanese rarely commit murders, but do have a genre of cinema that ‘celebrates’ murder. Probably.]

Video games (at least ones made in Japan) can never quite go there, embrace death the way yakuza movies do. Part of me always understood this, and that was part of the reason why it took me twenty years after I hung the Takeshi Kitano poster on my wall to play one of the video-games. [the video games also didn’t exist for seven or eight of those years, so there’s that] Mostly I think that insisting on the rawness and depravity of yakuza cinema was unfortunate, and I should have gotten into the games sooner.  But the longer I play the games, the more I wonder if they are taking moral shortcuts andavoiding real ugliness and criminality, to the point that it becomes a major detriment.