Yakuza Papers: observations on video games and film

It is deeply embarrassing how much history I learned from Ishin! Even typing that sentence is insane and humiliating. It’s like saying ‘everything I know about American Criminal law I learned from reading  Batman  comics.’ Not  Law and Order . Bat fucking Man . But that’s the thing, and maybe a little the point of this blog: if you knew NOTHING about criminal law, you’d know MORE after you read some  Batman . Occasionally Commissioner Gordon’s underlings will grumble about stuff like ‘warrants’ and if you had  never heard of a warrant -- well, you would have then. And, sometimes, people will talk about real people whose actions parallel those of the characters in the comic such as Al Capone, Jeffery Dhamer or Richard Nixon. If you had never heard of those people you would have a bit of context for figuring out who they were-- if you had any reason to suspect that they were more than fictional window dressing in the DC Universe.  Anyway, until somewhat recen...

 “Dennis Quaid wasn’t even IN  Twister… .but he knows I don’t know that.” -Ray Smuckles When the Question is put to you, you will realize that it (a version of it) has been asked of every generation that has coexisted with film. This, the question’s persistence, is the  truth , the reveal-- both the specific text of the Question (which must change), and even the Answer (which will always be the same) are completely unimportant.  My generation has now been asked the Question: is Hollywood so out of ideas that another version of fucking  Twister (FUCKING  TWISTER !!!) is all They could come up with? The Answer is They are not, but, They decided to make another fucking  Twister  anyway. This has always been true. Making a new movie is always a bigger pain in the ass, and a bigger exposure to risk, than making the same fucking movie over and over again. To the Last Man  is a pre-code Western that raises questions about just how bad and inept it i...

 “I’m [not on drugs] and I want...to...take his place” -Jonathan Richman The word ‘Golem,’ incidentally, is the smoking gun that outs JRR Tolkien as a raving anti-semite. For most people, ‘Golem’ is the corrupted ring-junckie from  The Hobbit  and  Lord of the Rings;  however, close students of the Kabbalah or Dungeons and Dragons know that ‘ a  golem’ or ‘ the  golem’ is a kind of magical robot from Jewish mythology. The famous one was built by Rabbis in medieval Prague and is the subject of a kind of dumbed down Frankenstein/Pygmalion type story. The fact that Tolkien borrowed a word from Jewish mysticism for his embodiment of corruption and greed really should end the debate about who he was and what he was about. For anyone who wants to extend the debate by pointing out that Golem is redeemable: the offer of redemption means a lot more to the ‘in group’ offering it, than the ‘out group’ that ‘needs’ it. To Tolkien Jews are defined by materialism an...

 [October, 2023] 1) can’t count the refrences to the Yakuza games. Like there is now a genre of movies-that-are-sort-of-like-Ryu-ga-Gataku games. But "Bad City" stars the-guy-who-was-Kuze, yeah, we’re doing Yakuza things. 1a: is Kuze my absolute favorite character in the Yakuza games? (not counting Takeshi Kitano-- he’s clearly his own thing) He’s fuckn up there. Pocket Circuit Fighter, and Goro are the other ones who spring to mind...Etrsuko the Obatarian, weapon master w the hat, a handful of Omi guys like Nishtani and Watase.....fuckn Shineda….but he’s also his own thing, in his way.  2) They set up a situation where a two cops shooting a single unarmed ‘civilian’ seems like a damn reasonable thing to do. Interesting to happen in Japanese movie. In a culture essentially w out guns, you do a scene w an explicit justification for cops shooting an unarmed man. Like, you WANT BADLY for the cops shoot the unarmed man. Seems more like a thing you might see in an American mov...

Just goddamit this is NOT ROCKET SCINCE. Every fucking idiot should know this. But apparently not. Smoke ‘em if you got ‘em: I: The earliest Western drama, going back to the Ancient Greeks, was defined by a binary between Tragedy and Comedy. But even by Shakespeare, who did write tragedy and comedy, you can see people growing skeptical of the distinction. He has pathos in the comedies, and people in the tragedies tell jokes. From what we understand of Shakespeare, the pressure to create works with more elements was  economic  and not  artistic : the guy’s who owned the Globe wanted to be able to sell seats to people who were worried that Hamlet would be too much of a ‘downer’ AND people who thought that the frivolity of Twelfth Night was beneath them. Serious Western drama persisted, was less concerned with a distinction between tragedy and comedy, and has not really had an effect on culture since maybe the mid nineteenth century. Obviously, people kept on writing plays, ...

 So, I’d been putting off the “Kasuga meets a White American Japan Nerd” substory for reasons that are gonna get more obvious. Bonus humiliation: I was going through the dialog so quickly I didn’t see if they mentioned anyone alongside Kurosawa, and that matters. If the American asshat shouts out Fukasaku it might break my heart a little. Anyway, the thing was cringy, I avoided completing it, then I hit a kinda ‘face your fears day’ and finished it. It was about what the American Japan Nerd has coming, but also RGG and the world can GET FUCKED. Just goddam everyone needs to work harder. During a rain storm, Kasuga is asked to choose between an umbrella and a stupid samurai hat-- I nailed it by choosing the hat. Problem: when you imagine a Japan Nerd are you thinking about a guy who is gonna check shit against his copy of Haga-fucking-kura? I got receipts, BITCH: There is something to be learned from a rainstorm. When meeting with a sudden shower, you try not to get wet and run quic...

 I keep getting Elvis songs stuck in my head and it is very hard to figure out how much of this is an intended part of the “Infinite Wealth” experience. I also keep being impressed with how much I end up liking Elvis, when I play the song that each chapter is named after. I feel like I am more aware of Elvis than a lot of people playing “Infinite Wealth” mostly because I imagine that 1) I am on the older end of the RGG fanbase and 2) I have a kind of half-assed knowledge/interest in the history of American music, particularly as related to race-relations, which is probably not true of everyone playing this game. A lot of people, including Japanese players, probably know MORE about it than I do, but I would guess that I am at least in the top half when it comes to knowledge/awareness of the history of rock n’ roll among RGG gamers. That’s just a guess. I wonder how many human beings have 1) played “Infinite Wealth” and 2) saw the King perform live? Around a hundred? That was my firs...

 2.21 -in the Japanese game “Infinite Wealth,” Kiryu, the dying protagonist, is encouraged by friends to make what the subtitles refer to as a ‘bucket list;’-- a list of things he wants to do before he dies. The phrase the characters use sounds like the English words ‘ending note;’ this all makes sense because 1) the ‘bucket list’ is (presumably?) a relatively recent concept so importing a phrase for it makes sense but 2) the actual term ‘bucket list’ derives from the colloquial/ vulgar euphemism ‘kick the bucket’ for death which might not translate into Japanese (on several levels). a) anyway the use of ‘ending note’ (which might refer to a slightly more specific concept than the extremely vague English term ‘bucker list’) seems representative of the increasing prevalence of phrases derived from English in other languages, which was something that I was talking about with a Korean speaker recently. Obviously, here the language is Japanese, but the forces involving importing words ...

 there is something really poignant in how the DIYs in Dondoko Island are ALL the assets from the yakuza series; objects, buildings, even/especially seemingly random ones from all over the series become available for you to craft. For some of us, it’s a whole lot of memories.  I don’t think the Proust cookies** will become craft-able, although they should. RGG is good enough that the joke would not surprise me, but I’m not counting on it.  It’s an interestingly, intimate moment; almost like a lover taking off their clothes, because this, moving around these blocks of pixels,  exactly  these blocks of pixels, is what the RGG guys have been doing themselves all along; they are giving us a much deeper look at the programer’s world than we have seen before.  So far, I have not found the desire to recreate stuff, or even, create, riff take ownership, of my resort. I put stuff places where it will function as it is supposed to, but, otherwise, pretty much at rand...

 “I look out into your eyes, I look out into your faces, you know what I see? I see a little bit of Elvis in each and every one of yah.” -Mojo Nixon Chuck D: Elvis was a hero to most but he never meant shit to me you see straight up racist that sucker was simple and plain Flavor Flav: motherfucker him and John Wayne. -Public Enemy “Everybody in outer space looks like Elvis, because Elvis is a perfect being. We are all moving in perfect peace and harmony twords Elvis-ness, soon all will become Elvis, everything, everywhere will be Elvis. Why do you think they call it ‘ evo lution’ anyway? It’s really ‘Elvis-lution’!” -M. Nixon I have been aware of the idea that Elvis was essentially a racist construct for about as long as I have been aware of Elvis-- an idea which should be fairly intuitive to anyone with even a passing familiarity with American music and history. By the end of the nineteenth century it was fairly obvious that ‘the blues’ or ‘jazz’ or ‘black people music’ was the mo...

 1.27 Infinite Wealth: Day 1 A few days ago it occurred to me that, if it was a teenage pitcher, Infinite Wealth would be about six and a half feet tall, 220 lbs, with smooth mechanics and a fastball that rested at, uh, whatever is real damn fast for a teenage fastball; they would have had a couple relatives make the majors and their dad would be a college pitching coach, or something.  You don’t start designing the plaque for Cooperstown. You don’t even fit him for the big league jersey. NOTHING is guaranteed. It is still probably more likely that the kid will be out of baseball in five years than on an all-star team. BUT if you wanted to imagine the perfect pitcher, that’s about where you’d start.  After one day with Infinite Wealth, the kid is getting TommyJohn surgery.  On some level, nothing has changed. The things we liked, the build, the lineage, are all still there; they could still win 300 games*** But this is NOT the start we had been hoping for *** assumin...

 These apology posts are weird, on a blog that is read by no one. Who exactly am I sorry to? Who could I have conceivably let down? The project is a journal, a personal inventory, at the beginning; a documentation of a relationship between a subject (me) and some fairly specific aspects of culture and art. But, really, it is just the stuff I have to say, even if I’m not saying it to anyone. Right now, what I have to say is this:  A longstanding belief of mine, to the point that it could be a theme of this blog if I had organized the blog differently, is that RGG are the significant successors to the post-modern novel and that post modern novels provide important context for understanding the background and significance of the RGG games.  Briefly: The open world format offers a solution to the clutter and confusion of the post-modern novel, whose subject is a reality that is so complex that it can only be described with multiple narratives. RGG takes advantage of this, to ...

 IMENSE spoilers for Gomorra the Series I suspect that there are more of these than I am aware. I am sure that stuff in the Marvel and Star Wars Universes count; probably you could find one in Faulkner, if you really wanted to keep score.  The relevant category is “works that cover an event/time period that had already been covered by a different work in the franchise-narrative, and ends with a re-connection with the main narrative” and the two that I am interested in are “Like a Dragon: Gaiden” by the RGG guys and “The Immortal” film spin off from the TV show Gomorrah. This strikes me as, even if I am missing a bunch, a pretty unusual narrative choice to make, and the Yakuza games and Gomorra are my two favorite things about this century, with no obvious competitors besides the 2004 Detroit Pistons and some Takeshi Kitano movies.  And, for bonus points, both “Gaiden” and “The Immortal” center on a protagonist type character that the narrative was trying to move away from...