8.3: War Crimes

I somewhat obviously went through the end game hoping that one of the clips of news reporters would at least mention that the building of the boat was potentially done under inhuman conditions and thus problematic, but that never happened. In the game the problem of the boat is that it implies corruption, because Japan is not supposed to have battleships, and thus the boat is proof of years of payoffs. The Chinese who built the boat were “refugees,” with some connection to a Triad, but their fate is never mentioned, and does not seem to matter to anyone. The important thing is that getting them there led a triad boss to know about the existence of the boat and thus be able to exert a certain degree of leverage over Yakuza. 

At some point in the five years since I played the game I reached the conclusion that the problem with the boat was that a boat of that size could only have been built in the last days of WWII by slave labor, and thus the physical boat was proof of a war crime. 

I admit to being too ready to accuse the Japanese of war crimes. I’m a product of a culture that holds some fucked beliefs, and I try to do stuff about it, understand things, not make things worse-- you run into limits, but you are still obliged to do better. So it goes. It’s not an excuse. It’s just how it is.

I don’t want anything that follows to excuse ME. In that any attention is payed to ME I am just another bad actor. As a critic, a gamer, a human being, my job was to faithfully remember the text of the game I had played (twice, actually), get it right, and proceed with my critique from the text that existed. And I did not do that. My recollection was not just wrong it was wrong and tainted with bigotry. I fucked up.

I don’t want the fact that my racist revisionism is more coherent than the game that existed to take away from the fact that my revisionism was a wrong-- especially given my roll in the process, playing a part for which I had volunteered-- for which there is no excuse. 

To try to-- for a moment-- invert cultural biases, we’ll step briefly into the Western Theater. Some Nazi powerbroker, with an ability to blend into the post war government, decides that post war Germany will be better off with an extra battery of V-2 rockets, and has them built, in secret, with foreign labor, in the very last days of WWII. Lets ignore that slave labor was pretty much the only kind of labor the Nazis had at that point. If, by the 1970s, the only person who knew about the transaction outside of Germany was a Camorrista (assuming Italian refugees) or someone affiliated with Balkan organized crime (another good source for refugees and crime lords), it would be a fair inference given 1) the unsavoryness of everyone involved and 2) the Nazi’s amply documented capacity for inhuman treatment of workers that the construction of the rockets was a bigger stain on the national character than their existence, because the construction of the rockets could really only have been accomplished by committing crimes against humanity. On the other hand, a single battery of rockets is relatively useless, and bribes paid to cover up their existence are more or less comical.

[to climb back onto a dumb hobby horse, while the secret V2s would be much more scary and likely to get concessions from a foreign country than the “Yamato Mark II”-- especially since they could have been equipped with either atomic or biological payloads relatively easily, depending on just how far after WWII and under what circumstances they were deployed-- I’ll actually take the Yamato in a head-to-head match up. If I remember Gravity’s Rainbow correctly able-to-hit-a-moving-boat was a level of accuracy that the V-2s were not especially near. And the Yamatos were extremely big and could conceivably have functioned after being hit by one or two rockets. The Yamato could absolutely fuck up a battery of V2 rockets, so the Yamato has that going for it, which is nice.

[[“a screaming comes across the sky…” could the Yamato outmaneuver the rocket? Nah, I think the point is the screaming is after the impact, bc the rocket moves faster than sound...fuckn’ A, GR is actually physically right next to me at this moment in time…. Gimme a sec here...eh… you don’t really get a description of the impact, relation of screaming to impact… the first couple pages of Gravity’s Rainbow do not answer the question of if a V2 rocket could hit a Yamato class battleship... it’s just about how air raids are fucking terrifying and then some slapstick...but now that I think about it, what Pynchon is describing is that you hear the rocket break the sound barrier before the rocket hits. So the battleship has a little bit of warning. Maneuvering is probably pointless, tho, bc I don’t think anyone knows, within a battleship’s tolerance, where the rocket will hit. But it would give you enough time to, like, duck, which would actually be a big deal if you wanted to keep operating your battleship after it was hit by the rocket.]]

On some level, the whole point of WWII was that the allies didn’t need to resort to slave labor or the most ghastly atrocities because they had been doing it all incrementally, over centuries and had infrastructures in place that were more efficient than cureltly.

The most famous interaction with between organized crime and waterfront labor of WWII was actually when Myer Lansky promised to keep the unions working the New York area ports for the duration of the war, in exchange for the US government letting mob boss “Lucky” Luciano out of jail. And the point, I think, was that the US government, the Unions, the Cosa Nostra, and Lansky were all sophisticated players, products of a geopolitical position that the Axis aspired to. Or: bribing gangsters is EASIER than using slave labor-- if it wasn’t the US would probably have used slave labor and kept Lucciano in prison.

I don’t want to act like I actually know much, or really anything, about Japan during the end and immediate aftermath of WWII. But even the game eludes to the fact that labor was hard to come by in the end of WWII-- hence the Chinese refugees. So the idea that the enormous battleship was built by Chinese laborers negotiating with Iwamii shipping through their duly elected Union representatives is absurd. Getting something that big done while in the process of loosing a World War STRONGLY SUGGESTS that some pretty rotten stuff happened to the people doing it. 

Again, I am an asshole for assuming the Japanese did war crimes, when the text does not say they did war crimes. But at the very least the Ryu-Ga-Gotaku guys outright dismissal of this possibility is 1) problematic, 2) fairly ridiculous.