6.29-30

6.29 

When I have turned on 6, I’m still just killing time waiting to go back to Big Lo and get on with things, trying to figure out if I want to do my mini-Takeshi Kitano film festival before or after I play his chunk of the game. 

For all of this, and for sometime before, and for the foreseeable future, some joker has been hanging out of a window on Tenuchi street yelling something that I would phoneticize as approximately “Tas-ka-tay,” which subtitles tell me means “help me.” I am in no hurry to advance this guy’s sub story and drag him into the window because 1) he’s an asshole and 2) his constant subtitled screaming was a big step in my learning a few Japanese words-- so I am going to let him literally hang for a while longer.

The deal is that you can’t advance his story until you look at him in “first person mode” and I figured out that “tas-ka-tay” probably means something like ‘help me’-- because I was hearing it with the subs whenever I walked on Tenuchi street-- before it occurred to me to look at him in ‘first person mode’ because that is the ONLY time you have to use ‘first person mode’ in the entire game (and if I’m being honest, the internet probably told me to do it, and I didn’t actually figure it out).

But even knowing one word changes how you interact with a language: sometimes I will hear ‘help me’ in something that gets translated as ‘all is lost’-- indicating that the original was probably like ‘there is no helping us.’

Lets talk about Bad Guys and Navel Power:

Matsunaga is an earnest, ornery and not all that bright member of Takeshi Kitano’s Yakuza family, who is, in the background of a lot of scenes, working on a replica of a Yamato-class battleship. The replica battleship is a lot cooler as a beautiful little quirk for a relatively minor character, than it is as a foreshadowing of the fact that the ‘secret of Omomichi’ is a bonus Yamato-class battleship.

Beyond the observation that Japan’s continued interest in the Yamato-class is a bit weird (there is a media franchise about turning the damn thing into a space ship), the Imperial Japanese had a different navel super weapon that would have made for a much better ‘secret of Onomichi:’*** the I-400 class submarine, which were the biggest submarines ever built-- and remained so well into the cold war. 

*** I was wrong about aspects of the ‘secret of Onomichi’ that are not really referenced in this post.

Obviously, as a submarine, you could stash an I-400 on the bottom of the ocean (this being one of the core functionalities of most submarines)**** without resorting to a trap door in the ocean, which, there is no real possible explanation for 1) how it works, 2) how it was built in absolute secrecy and 3) how it remained undiscovered for seventy years. But more than that, the I-400s kicked ass, and remain fairly obscure since the war ended before they saw action.

*** the dummies with their dumb Titanic fetish had gotten their dumb asses killed in their dumb homemade sub at around this time

The main feature of the I-400s was the three collapsable seaplanes that they could launch from compressed-air powered catapults for bombing missions, but they also could travel to anywhere in the world and return. The I-400s carried a crew of 144, auto cannons that could fire over 15 kilometers, and eight torpedo tubes. They were built for extremely ambitious attacks on American costal cities, possibly using biological weapons, and are an absolute classic when it comes to ‘never-actually-used-WII-super-weapons.’

Rhapsodizing about submarines is a good clue about which of the Axis powers my ancestors fought for. My grandfather was born in Germany in 1926 and fought for the Wermacht. If he ever held any Nazi beliefs he kept them completely to himself after at least 1950; but he retained a fondness for submarines until they buried him in a Jewish cemetery. 

I perversely cherish the fact that my belief that submarines are cool is something that has been passed down from Joseph fucking Gobbles, because selling the inter-war generation of German youth on the coolness of submarines is a feat of propaganda that you just have to tip your hat to. It was obvious-- no one ever tried to hied it-- that on a U-Boat you lived in the constant smell of actual human shit, seconds away from dying in one of a variety of horrible ways, never knowing if you would see the sun again; and weather or not that happened was completely out of your control. Based on their World War I experiences, the Germans knew that 1) serving on a U-Boat sucked and 2) U-Boats were the best thing they had going for them on the seas. So they needed to convince people that it was still a good idea to serve on a U-Boat, despite all the evidence to the contrary, and they did a very good job of it. 

Perhaps relatedly, submarines are also special to film for the reason that the set pice submarine scene, in which the heroic crew fires torpedos and then waits for the depth charges, is entirely in the hands of the director and actors. The script does not matter, because the technical things they shout to each other mean nothing to an audience; the set does not matter because it is always the same. Special effects don’t even matter, because you don’t actually want to see the submarine, you want to see the fate of the people in the submarine.

The instruments make beeps, the actors respond to the beeps with life-or-death emotion, and the camera does what it can accentuate emotion and mood, (and sometimes shakes when the ship gets depth-charged). The scene is entirely sustained by the craft of the actors and film makers-- there is no content, just a test of how good the actors and directors are at their jobs.

Just because I have never seen one does not mean that is not out there, but, to my knowledge, the Japanese have never made a major submarine movie, and I wonder if there is a connection to the fact that anti-Japanese racism is a major driver in some of the classics.

Obviously, there’s Run Silent, Run Deep, maybe the most beloved submarine film of all, in which the punchline is that the Japanese are somehow ‘cheating’ at warfare. But the major culprit might be Destination Tokyo-- which was filmed as a pro war propaganda, but now is a portrait of men in a metal tube using sexual frustration and race hatred to psyche themselves up to commit war crimes. Problematically, two of these men are Carry Grant and John Garfield, and while everything about the characters they portray is vile, they are also, clearly, even in that garbage, two of the all-time greats when it comes to acting on film.

Grant gives a speech in which he makes it clear that their goal is not the destruction of the Japanese people but rather the destruction of Japanese culture. It’s a great actor in an unspeakably ugly moment, and you have to wonder how many Japanese people have seen it, how many of them were filmmakers, and the extent to which the memory of that abomination would take the charm out of most submarine related projects. 

I think about Kinii Fukasaku watching that movie in post-war Japan, in a world where the most sympathetic people were the Yakuza, and wondering if Carry Grant hadn’t actually pulled it off. 

6.30

I might have finally screwed myself. The final technique in mastering the Yakuza series is lining your play through up so you generally have a couple hours of relatively mindless shit to do when your (meat space) team plays baseball-- so you can listen to the ballgame in the background while you grind for exp slinging ramen, leading a street gang, gambling like an unhinged degenerate, managing a hostess club, working out, hitting on hostesses, PLAYING ALL THE ARCADE GAMES, fighting in illegal cage matches, and other stuff like that (not Majohng or shogi tho, way over my head). Anyway, the amount of mindless stuff vs story, number of movies I want to watch before fighting Kitano, and free time/Mets games just don’t really add up at the moment. It’s aggravating. 

Yesterday, I got done w Big Lo’s exposition, and went back to Onomichi where I beat up a lot of people and am now in a rare puzzle solving level-- which I am pretty sure will end with the Takeshi throw down. I think I can mess around in New Gaudi, maybe do the ‘bonus’/useless clan missions, and some of my least favorite substories in the series. 

An annoyance is that I am woefully short on ‘green experience.’ I think I am pretty much powerful enough (and stocked up on RIZIAP supplements) to take me through the game, but I would like to limit break-- ideally before I fight Kitano-- and unlock ALL THE THINGS. 

[10.19-- I did very few sub stories in this play through-- which might have accounted for the 'issues' that I faced in the endgame w not having enough green or purple experience. And the real issue is that I was being an OCD freak/typical gamer w an inexplicable need to unlock anything that was unlock-able. The bare minimum exp you get from doing story missions + the contents of a convenience store can get you through any fight in the damn game on 'hard.'-- even if you are not all that good at fighting games, you probably don't need to even invest in energy drinks.]