Like a Kondo Isami

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.BatfuckingMan.

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 recently, I would have put Sword of Doom as one of the more respected and liked samurai movies among Japan Nerds generally, and my extremely small circle of friends in particular. Then I played Ishin!, and then I did some other stuff, and then I re-watched Sword of Doom-- and now, I don’t feel comfortable saying that I, or anyone I know, has ever, actually, seen Sword of Doom at all.

The issue is that Sword of Doom includes a certain amount of ‘real history’-- specifically plot points involving historical people and institutions, notably Kondo Isami and the Shinsengumi, and never I knew that. I STILL couldn’t even begin to tell you what the significance of this is, but, it has to mean something, I think? 

So the question is, if you saw, for example, Robin Hood (Errol Flynn) but assumed that it was set in the same world as The Hobbit and not someone’s idea of an actual England, what would you have really seen? Very possibly a more coherent movie than Errol Flynn’s Robin Hood generally is-- but a DISTINCTLY DIFFERENT movie from what Flynn thought he was making and a different film than what was seen by the vast majority of people who have watched Robin Hood. The fact that it is a very dumb interpretation of a ‘real’ historical moment, recreated in cardboard and technicolor, is just a big part of what Robin Hood IS. 

And, really, it leaves me feeling pretty good about the fact that most of my information comes from, essentially, Samurai Batman. I know that Kondo Isami was a guy; I know that the Shinsengumi was an organization. I’m not tempted to pretend I actually know anything else; if you’re gonna expound on criminal law with your only source as The Fat Cop From Batman, you are, almost certainly going to sound like an asshole (average Republican?); I am on notice that my ‘information’ is garbage; it’s helpful. 

Before, I saw Sword of Doom as a kind of deeply psychological and abstract film, set a few doors down from where the guys are hanging out in Waiting for Godot. Now, well, it actually still might exist in extreme proximity to Waiting for Godot only this version of Godot includes a cameo appearance by Robin Hood. 

That MIGHT be Sword of Doom-- it’s Godot, only at a certain point Robin shows up, nails some trick-shots, wanders off, and then the guys go back to waiting. That, obviously, might NOT be Sword of Doom. It is interesting that Robin Hood (or Batman) inserted randomly into Godot would probably do very little to change the overall experience of the play, or the audience’s perception of the play. What would be more likely to change is the audience’s perception of Robin Hood. 

An immense problem with the Western Japan Nerd is that to us Kondo Isami seems like the sort of person who could wonder into any samurai movie and seem like he belonged. The ‘truth’ (HA!) is that this is only true of samurai movies set in the end of the Bakamatsu period: to Kondo’s infinite credit, he did live the sort of life where making a cameo appearance in pretty much any Samurai film set in his lifetime would be well within the allowable tolerance of historical fiction. It is (as far as I can tell) like having the town Marshal with about five minutes of screen time in any Western set between 1870-1910 be Wyatt Earp-- why not?

What I suspect (like, really strongly) is that Kondo* lived 1) an unusual life the particulars of which were 2) deeply rooted in the exact historical moment in which his life occurred. There is an inevitable slight of hand in the popular portrayal of history. The people with the best stories get their stories told. The reason they had the best stories is because, within the context in which they lived, they were singular individuals. There is a pretty quick road to untangling this when the history in question is that of either ‘your’ culture or one to which you have easy access. It’s obvious that we are still talking about Robin Hood hundreds of years after he lived because turning bandit and robing from the rich to give to the poor was an extremely atypical response to monarchical injustice.

You still don’t HAVE to untangle it: I’m sure that more Anglo-Americans than I want to think about believe that ‘Robin Hood’ was a career path in medieval Europe, despite the fact that Robin Hood was a very unusual person-- who comes up to this day because there was approximately one of him. 

Similarly, being such a bad dude that someone made you a Samurai was not (to my reasonably confident knowledge), actually, a thing that happened to many people at all-- other than Kondo Isami. But Kondo is such a good character that he personally appears in many stories and is the inspiration for characters in even more; with no information other than silly stories, Westerners think that Kondo was a fairly typical samurai, rather than a man whose singular life let him fit in relativity seamlessly with fictional characters.

I think, for me and most Japan nerds, history and Japan are basically losing propositions. I will only ever have ‘information’ about how little I actually know. I’m never going to have an insight into Japan or Japanese history or culture. What is at stake is an ability to understand more about how to learn about cultures, where the little information I have comes from, and how to best deploy an extremely small amount of information into a useful response to important art. 

In this context, it is just staggering how many of my ‘Rosettta stone’ moments with Japanese culture-- times when I acquired a foothold that allowed me to learn more from a previous experience-- come from video games, and RGG in particular. Learning is, obviously, hugely personal but gaming, due to both the repetition and the need for the learner to directly engage, has the potential to be an extremely powerful teacher, not merely of facts, but of more nebulous things like cultural nuance and attitudes. 

I don’t have any idea how many of the samurai movies I’ve seen included an appearance by Kondo Isami. If I had noticed that the name came up unusually often, my first guess would probably have been that “Kondo Isami” was the late Bakamatsu equivalent of “John Smith.” What led me to realize that Kondo Isami was a person and start connecting different portrayals of him to each other was meeting him in Ishin! where he looked like Adachi from the Kasuga games and gave me missions. This put him in a completely different category from ‘background character in a movie’ and was, essentially, a call to action for my brain to start engaging in synthesizing information-type activities. 

This is a power that RGG seems far more hep to than other players in the industry-- and they are clearly deploying this power to Japan’s geopolitical advantage. Play enough RGG, and, like it or not, you’ll end up knowing your ‘chans’ from your ‘kuns’ plus a handful of other essentially silly little things about Japanese culture. BUT compare ‘a handful of silly little things’ to NOTHING. The foothold in Japan that you get in RGG is enough to make interacting or doing business with a Japanese person far more attractive and familiar than with someone from China, elsewhere in Asia, India, Africa,Russia, or even possibly Western Europe. 

Given the potential secondary function as a primer on how to interact with a Japanese person without pissing them off, it is fascinating how jealously Japanese gaming companies guard one thing that could both 1) lead to much stronger insights into Japan and 2) be taught quite effectively through gaming: the language. I would LOVE a mini game that taught me a little bit of Japanese vocabulary, or something about how kanji work, or, really ANYTHING about the language’s structure or grammar. But they NEVER do it. Instead, they rub salt in the wound by using the games to teach ENGLISH to Japanese players, and then doing a silly job of translating those bits.

The worst offenders are actually, in my opinion, the Persona series.** Instead of making up nonsense words for all your abilities, why not have what you call the ‘fire attack’ just be the Japanese for ‘fire attack’? I feel like this would be EASIER than what they did, and you’d end the game knowing twenty odd words of a new language. It sure SEEMS an awful lot like a win-win; instead I’ve had to learn an amount of a FAKE FUCKING LANGUAGE just to play games in an actual language that I wish I knew. 

My theory: if they tried to teach you Japanese, you would have an increase in Japan-Nerds attempting to speak godawful Japanese to Japanese people, who would find it disrespectful and aggravating. [RGG has made it abundantly clear that speaking Japanese badly is somewhere between terminally uncool and deeply evil] They have no intention, no reason, to give you the tools to make authentic or powerful insights-- they just want to beat some manners into us, and, in a stroke of unfathomable genius, figured out that letting us beat up a million digital goons was the way to do it. 

*Japanese naming conventions can get confusing for Westerners, just generally, but Kondo Isami is one of the aggravatingly large number of people who was just a TOTAL DICK about it, because he went by several names over the course of his life, changing names at (presumably?) significant moments that do not seem to translate especially well into our culture. ‘Kondo Isami’ was NOT what he was born as; it was what he went by when they executed him. My BEST GUESS is that ‘Kondo’ was the family name of the samurai family that he ‘became part of’ (not gonna start to pretend I understand the mechanism which made that possible), so ‘Kondo’ is what I call him in moments when I think a single name flows better in a sentence than ‘Kondo Isami.’

** The major wasted opportunity in RGG is, in my opinion, the “Sujidex” system in Kasuga’s two games. Since all the enemy types have names that are pretty good/involved/strange word play in English, it seems like a fair inference that something interesting was going on with what they were called in the original. [I suspect that it involves the shape the characters used to describe the enemies, at least a little] So, it would be cool if they gave you a kind of sub-mini-game where you could figure out what the enemies were called in Japanese, and, once you had it worked out, you would get some kind of bonus against that enemy type. Maybe some battles would start with a quicktime event where you had to figure out what an enemy type was called in Japanese, and if you nailed it you would get a massive damage boost against them. OR there could be a ‘character job’ whose skills involved dealing damage or debuffs to enemies by using their Japanese names [exchange student?]